
Class __P O k_ 
Book.___Gj L ^i-^ 
CopglitN" - 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Ipfctutes 

of an 

ITnlanb Sea 



HItret) Xambourne 



^be Deseret iRews 

PublisDcrs. 



OOHQHEMB, 

CL/lJW <»-^XX«. Mo. 
COPY 8. 



Copyrighted by 
ALFRED LAMBOURNE, 



preface. 

These pictures, if such slight memoranda can 
fitly be called pictures, norv appear tn I heir fourth 
guise. They were, in part, first issued as news- 
paper and magazine articles, and secondly as an 
illustrated pamphlet. The latter publication was 
given an extensive circulation on both sides the 
Atlantic, having passed through many issues, so 
that, in that form at least, they appear to contain 
— some ten years having elapsed between the first 
and last editions — a lasting vitality. They were 
also distributed in book form as presentation sou- 
venirs, very few of these, however, having been 
seen by the public. It was the interest accorded to 
the earlier issues of the word-pictures that led to 
their being by ought out in the present volume, and 
in which an entirely new arrangetnent of the mat- 
ter they contain has been made. 

As will readily be seen, the pictures are com.- 
posed almost entirely of paragraphs taken from, an 
irregular diary, segregated, of course, from, other 
^natter contained therein, and re-arranged with 
now and then a conjunctional word or sentence, 
and a few explanatory and imaginative para- 



PREFACE 

graphs. They have, I fear, a degree of harshness 
in transition that will, no doubt, be unpleasant to 
the reader, for I have thought it best to leave each 
entry in the rough. In one instance there has been 
a direct transference of thought, and several para- 
graphs have been taken from now discarded arti- 
cles and given here a place. They are, on the 
whole, purely descriptive, although containing a 
few extracts from entries made in the introspec- 
tive or speculative mood. 

In the present arrangement a license was taken 
for the sake of unity. The plan allows of the mat- 
ter being arranged for artistic effect, that is, irre- 
spective oj the order in which it was obtained. 
The imaginary part lessens not, I trust, the value 
of that which is truth. The lines of demarcation 
are plain, and there is no encroachment of inven- 
tion upon fact. I m.ean in the descriptions — the 
main part of the text. It was the writer's desire 
to carry out to the full the plan here outlined. He 
did build a hut on the now noted island, and in- 
tended to live therein. He would, had it been 
possible to him, have made out of what is now but 
a past dream, an tinquestioned reality, so that, 
after all, although a certain amount of the frame- 
work which holds these descriptions together, is 
fiction pure and simple, it is a truth in the writer'' s 
mind. The arrangement by which he surrendered 
his homestead entry — No. 12592 — to the State of 



PREFACE 

Utah, the legal fight thereafter, the questions as to 
whether the tatid was of a mineral or of an agri- 
cultural character, are matters of local and de- 
partmental record. The receipts for attorney'' s 
fees; papers of hearing; demurrers, answers to 
dem,itrrers, etc., without end, are facts, and so too, 
are the circulars, catalogues, etc., which I received 
whilst planning my vineyard; a vineyard which 
the daily papers declared at the time, was to be 
like unto that of Naboth, whose luxuriant beauty 
caused a tragic episode in the history of ancient 
Zion. 

Captain Stansbury first pointed out {in his 
report of surveys 1849 50 ) how very much in the 
way of unusual scenery might be enjoyed on a 
cruise that would comprehend all parts of the 
Inland Sea; and its briny waters and their sur- 
roundings, as viewed from the southern mainland, 
certainly make such a circumnavigation appear 
desirable. It was on such a lengthened cruise that 
the picturesque nature of Gunni on Islatid was 
■made apparent to the 7vriter, and he felt his desire 
to live upon it. This, too, zvas long before his 
homesteading of the place was a po'ssibility. The 
pictures are the result of that first and subsequent 
visits, and through an intimate acquaintance with 
the moods of the Inland Sea. 

Perhaps the pictures contain too much of the 
superlative vein; but nothing has been exagger- 



PREFACE 

ated. That which is distinctive to the place of their 
making — that has been dwelt tipon. All that is 
told as having been seen was seen, and fuay be seen 
again by a^iy who may so desire. Even rjuhile I 
write, the engineers are at work on the Lucin cut- 
off, a piece of railroading skill that will take the 
traveling public who tnake the overland trip 
across the main reach of the Inland Sea, and 
within sight of Gunnison Island, so that by the 
many the truth or untruth of these pictures may 
then be known. The paragraphs were selected — to 
one selection, viany discarded — to form strong, 
simple word-pictures; to give an impress such as 
was made upon the -tnind of him who wrote them. 
The writer, however, does not try to corroborate or 
to chime in with any previous statements. He told 
to his diary his own etnotions and seeings alone. 

May he here express ivhat has been his hope in 
arranging these pages — that whatever shortcom- 
ings the work tnay contain, the new reader, who- 
soever or wheresoever he may be, will pardon the 
putting forth of an uncompleted task, and at the 
same time see in the design, something of a true 
artistic purpose, a harmotiy in this recalling, this 
sketching of scenes, all of which were found within 
the circle of horizon visible from his own doorstep. 



Contents* 



fntroDuction. 
Zbc ITnlanD Sea. 

I. (Sunnison IFslanO in "OQltntcr. 

II. milD anD TimtnOB /Hbarcb. 

III. TUnDer tbe Bog Star. 

IV. Voice of tbe Swan. 

V. (Sunnlson ITslanD— ffarewell. 
Supplement. 



plates. 



I. Sunrise at (Sunnlson IfsIanJ). 

II. Zbc IRortb CUtt. 
HI. Desolate Sbores. 

IV. :JSlacft ■Rocft trom tbe Dunes, 

V. XLxclUQbt at tbe /Bbarsbes. 

VI. 2Hfterglow on tbe TRUasatcb. 

VII. Ht IRest— promontory ipoint. 



^^TJiat is lest which lieth nearest. ^^ 



Ifntrobuction. 

The Inland Sea is unique. In the Quarter- 
nary period, so our geologists tell us, a vast 
body of glacier- fed waters covered the valleys 
of north-western Utah. Of the ancient Bon- 
neville, as that vanished sea is designated, our 
subject is the bitter fragment. Much has 
been written of late concerning this reminder 
of other days, but only, aside from scientific 
statements, in glittering generalities, and by 
men whose knowledge of the facts was but 
superficial indeed. 

The truth is that the Inland Sea, or the 
Great Salt Lake as it is more often called, is 
neither the sullen, listless, deadly sheet of 
water it was once described as being, nor is 
it, on the contrary, that realm of endless 
charm which late travelers and writers have 
endeavored to make it appear. It is compos- 
ite. Alternately, we are captivated by the 

15 



INTBOBUCTION . 

strange beauty it presents, and repelled by 
the ugliness that i« seen along its shores. 

By the low grounds marking the margins of 
the valleys, or where the tall, dark hills slope 
down to the water's edge in commonplace, 
rounded forms, or with broad, flat, sage- 
covered spaces between their feet and the 
shore, the ugliness is most apparent. Larva- 
covered, or white v/ith encrusted salt and 
alkali, the beaches at those places are 
truly forbidding. The eye is offended, the 
mind is distressed. Melancholy has taken up 
its permanent abode along those repellant and 
desolate shores. 

Elsewhere, despite this fact, attractions, 
and even remarkable beauties are seldom 
wanting. Where the mountains stoop precipi- 
tously to the sea, or where the islands lift 
abruptly from its shining surface, are scenes 
both grand and imposing. The pale green 
water breaks in turquoise waves upon beaches 
of glistening pebbles, or lies stilly transparent 
upon stretches of soft, white sand. Where 
the streams enter the sea on its eastern side, 

16 



INTRODUCTION 

are extensive marshes, haunted by the birds 
usually found under such conditions, and other 
wild birds dwell on the islands. The western 
shores are strewn with monstrous boulders, or 
littered with great heaps of fallen stone; high 
cliffs look down upon the passer-by; along the 
far horizon are chains of lofty and noble 
mountains, and always is the Inland Sea 
strangely respondent to the changing skies 
and the light of a brilliant and prismatic 
luminary. 

In altitude, the Inland Sea is 4,210 feet 
above ocean level; its length is somewhat 
between seventy and eighty miles, its width 
between thirty and forty, and in outline is 
somewhat peculiar. Roughly speaking, it may 
be said to resemble a human hand. The 
fingers are pressed together and point toward 
the north, north-west. The stretch of water 
forming the thumb is known as Bear River 
Bay, and the dividing mountains between 
thumb and fingers, as Promontory Range. In 
the palm of the hand are four large islands — 
Stansbury's, Antelope or Church, Carringtor 

3 

17 



INTRODUCTION 

and Fremont, and besides these, three that are 
smaller lie away to the north — Strong's Knob, 
Dolphin Island and Gunnison. Along the 
eastern shore lie the Wasatch Mountains, a 
bold and picturesque chain, to the south are 
the less known and lower Oquirrbs, the Tuilla 
or Grantsville Mountains, and to the west, the 
Terrace and other spurs of the Desert Range. 
Black Rock, Garfield Beach, and Saltair 
Pavilion are all on the southern shore. From 
either of these three named points, looking 
northward, sky and water are seen to meet, 
save on very clear days, when the Malad, and 
the white, snow-covered peaks of the Raft 
River Mountains, greet the sight, defining in 
that direction the barrier line to the ancient 
Bonneville. 



18 



(5unnt0on llslan^ in XKHtntcr 



pictures 

of an 

IFnlanb Sea 

I. 

(5unnl0on llslant) in uminter 

Ghostly, wrapped in its shroud of snow, my 
island stands white above the blackness of 
unfreezing waters. 

What have I done? Although I had lived 
by anticipation these days, no sooner did the 
sails of the departing yacht vanish below the 
watery horizon, and leave me with my thoughts 
alone, than I realized at once, and with a 
strange sinking of the heart, too, how more 
intense indeed, how deeper than all imagining, 
is the wildness and desolation of the savage 
poem around me. 

SI 



TEE INLAND SEA 

Clearly an error — one should not be rash! 
In winter this comfortless place might be 
some lonely spot of the Arctic. Often on 
still nights the snow around my dwelling is 
illumined by the boreal light, and at times of 
tempest is heard through the hours the grind- 
ing of boulders as they are lifted by the 
heavy waters and then let fall again to pound 
great holes in the outlying strata, or the roar 
of the breakers as they hurl briny foam far 
up the face of the northern cliff. 

"A man," says Alger, "may keep by himself 
because he is either a knave or a fool," and 
the wise Lord Bacon, in writing "Of Friend- 
ship," has quoted in italics this sentence from 
Aristotle, '^Whosoever is delighted in solitude 
is either a wild beast or a god" Now I am 
not a knave, and there are good reasons I 
hope, why I should not consider myself a fool. 
Neither am I a wild beast, nor do I arrogate 
unto myself the being a god. And yet, for 
the time being, I have chosen to be alone. 
What writes Schopenhauer? "What a man 

22 



THE INLAND SEA 

has in himself," argues the sage, "is the chief 
element in his happiness. But this," he makes 
haste to define as — "apart from health and 
beauty — the power to observe and commune." 
"The proper study of mankind is man," we 
allow that dictum. Nature is secondary. The 
alleys in the wood or forest of Windsor or 
Arden were but backgrounds in the mind 
of Shakespeare — stage settings for the actors 
in the human drama. But here is the digest 
of the thought we follow: If the seeking of 
isolation "proceed not out of the mere love 
of solitude, but out of a love and desire to 
sequester a man's self for a higher conversa- 
tion, then indeed, one may feel the god-like 
within us," and in this benefit I hope to share. 
Saying unto my soul, from out the wildness 
of this desert solitude, I desire to extract the 
beautiful and the good, I plead Not Guilty 
to the charge of moroseness, and also to those 
equal follies against which the master we have 
already quoted has warned us — "a too great 
admiration of antiquity and a love of novelty." 



23 



THE INLAND SEA 

More dreary are the silent, implacable days 
than are the times of uproar. For Christmas 
Carol, for New Year's Greeting, I heard but 
the shrill, sudden call of the startled gull, or 
the dry, harsh croak of the passing raven. 

"No track of men, no footsteps to and fro." 

The bitter cold frets in the stillness, the 
surface of wind-drift and level, or slowly the 
big snow flakes fall out of the sky. I have 
thoughts of Teufelsdrockh. Is this the North 
Cape? My but — massive though small, its 
low, thick walls built of rough, untrimmed 
slabs of stone, taken from the cliff by which 
they stand, its roof, earth-covered, its chim- 
ney, starting from the ground, and almost 
half as big as the hut itself — might be that 
of some hardy Lofoten fisherman. My boat, 
too, the Hope, under its canvas cover, the 
distant islands like mighty bergs, and the 
tongues of land like snow-covered floes, carry 
out my present thought. By the red light, 
also, that so often flares in the sky, and the 
midnight moon with a lonely storm circle 

24 



THE INLAND SEA 

around it, like an arctic parhelion, the north- 
ern feeling, the semblance to the frozen circle 
is further supplied. I rise late. Oil and 
driftwood are not so plentiful that I should 
use unseemly hours for their burning. For 
exercise, when the weather is favorable, I 
hack at the tough old trunks of the sarco- 
batus bushes, or grub among the gnarled and 
twisted roots of the antique sage. At other 
times, I take a romp with "Twa Dogs" along 
the beach, or across to the opposite bay, and 
so cheat the hours that creep on with leaden 
feet. What my poor, dumb brutes may think 
of this place, I cannot say, but I read ennui in 
their gaze. Why I remain here is a mystery 
to them, and they have not the recourse of 
labor or book. As in the Norse mythology, 
the sun often comes up all faint and wan, sick 
nigh unto death, and looks languid o'er the 
world of white. My island is but a vast, 
natural sun-dial, a horologe set in this sea 
to measure the flight of time. Its mighty 
gnomon is the northern cliff, and its circling 
shadow has crept thus far how many years? 

25 



IBE INLAND SEA 

The sky sometimes appears black, — that is, at 
noonday when it is clear and the near snow 
fields rise against it. Black with a thin 
scumbling of atmospheric cobalt. The snow, 
perchance, takes on the spectrum hues; the 
angles, flutings, waves and mounds of wind- 
carved drifts, catching the white rays of light 
and resolving them back into their component 
parts, or, on cloudy days, it shrinks together 
and grows leaden hued in the breath of 
Chinook. In the dim, uncertain and mysterious 
close of day, when all objects appear to ex- 
pand in size and grow monstrous to the sight, 
I half expect to see, springing from that 
Niflheim in the north, the gaunt, grey form 
of the Fenris wolf, and to behold his fiery eyes 
as he passes onward to his terrible feast, when 
Odin and Thor, and the lesser ones too, shall 
become his prey in Ragnarok, the last, weird 
twilight of the northern gods. 

What complaint shall I make? No time 
this to give way to the dumps. My gage was 
thrown down, and I must e'en abide the result. 

26 



IHE INLAND SEA 

No recourse now other than to meet without 
flinching this sullen, this stealthy or boister- 
ous foe. Were he never so silent, this grim 
tyrant would, did he but once find me in his 
power, turn my blood into ice, and harden my 
flesh as iron. Two months now and a day. 
Time should not be measured by the tick o' 
the clock, but by gain of experience. Accord- 
ing to that mode of reckoning, I have consider- 
ably aged. "Blessed are the lymphatic," 
they are the masters of the earth. Strong is 
the negative force. Blessed is the bear who 
during the period of hibernation can suck his 
own paw and let the dark hours go by. The 
first part of a violent loneliness so like that 
of a deep pain or grief; and who would have 
thought that the desert could thus quickly have 
taught me so much? The red sparks from 
the chimney which, pressing my nose against 
the panes, I see — how quick they career, like 
mad snakes across the snow, and are quenched! 
It is one thing to look on this Inland Sea, 
from where its waves are seen to rise and fall, 
keeping time, in rhythmic motion, as it were, 

27 



THE INLAND SEA 

to the sound of music and the dancers' feet, 
and it is quite another thing to brave it in 
this solitude and alone. This is the unfriend- 
liness rather than the sweet3 of seclusion. 
Two of the chairs which the recluse Thoreau 
mentions as among his rustic furniture — first, 
for solitude, second, for friendship, third, for 
society — would be useless here. The Inland 
Sea, and the bleak, inhospitable time, keep my 
island and myself in unbroken ostracism. 

Philip Gilbert Hamerton once built a hut. 
Over forty years ago, on the Boulsworth Moors 
— in Yorkshire — he painted on the spot, when, 
as he tells us, "shepherds refused to wander 
on the hills and sheep were lost in the snow." 
Thoreau, at Walden Pond, wrote a book, and, 
besides with transcripts of nature, filled half 
its pages with a sort of grumbling philosophy. 
"Society" came to Hamerton; and at "The 
Pond," even on the coldest nights of a New 
England winter, the creak of timber-laden 
wagons could be heard on the near Lexington 
Road. Twice a day the Fitchburg train went 
snorting by. Here it is different. That star 

28 



THE INLAND SEA 

which is sometimes seen quivering across the 
hills of Promontory, is my only visitant, if 
visitant it can be called. I know it to be the 
headlight of a locomotive dragging its train 
load of human beings across the land, and 
fancy makes me think that the lone light of 
my window 

Flashes an answer back — confederate. 

Only I fear it is not seen. In that same 
fancy I meet my friends. I am not molested 
by drunken gypsies; no angry poacher comes 
here, nor by any possibility will some scullery 
maid pass this way, whom I might espouse. 
Neither does anyone come to offer the per- 
formance of a household drudgery, no loved 
one of loved ones appears, to pass with me an 
evening, the memory of which shall be glad- 
ness. I am not as fortunate as he of Walden, 
or Diogenes in his tub. My repented temerity 
has brought me for the nonce where I am 
more isolated than Stylites on his pillar, less 
visited than was Timon of Athens. 

What is solitude? — a condition of mind. 
39 



2HE INLAND SEA 
After all, there are days when I but little feel 
the loss of the world. To lack in friendship 
for one's friends; to be at discord with — to be 
out of fitness with — one's surroundings, is 
more to be in solitude than merely to be 
alone. Selfishness is solitude. Its bitterness 
increases as does the salt in this Inland Sea. 
Just now it appears to be shunned by all that 
has life. But it is self-contained, it gives 
back scorn for scorn. It returns with interest 
the day's sullen or wrathful mood. 

Snow to- day slid down the northern cliff. 
Mixed with stones, it made considerable noise. 
The snow-falls here are thought to be light; 
but surely there is enough. On the mountains, 
too, a fierce wind storm is raging. Up there 
one could scarcely keep his footing. The 
great snow-banners are whirled from the 
crests, and grand I know is the sound, and 
solemn, too, when the strong northern winds 
smite upon those wind-harps, the pines, and 
along the mountain sides, the snow is caught 
from the forest branches and sent madly up 

■ 30 



THE INLAND SEA 

by crag and ravine. But see ! Behold, how the 
winds can revel on these waters, too! Behold 
how they sweep over the long reaches of un- 
broken water, how they pick up the foam- 
dust from the waves of the Inland Sea, and, 
mixed with snow-dust, from the island cliff, 
whirl it around and around! Solemn, too, 
heard in the night, is that other sound, the 
lashing of distant storms. The level of this 
sea is to my island, what the floor of the 
clouds is to the mountain peaks. Then no 
wonder the strong winds rage! What a sud- 
den obstacle these stubborn rocks must be! 
We sometimes speak of a blinding snow-storm. 
I doubt me if Dante, as he walked by the side 
of Virgil, witnessed more fierce commotions 
when, in the second circle of the Inferno, he 
beheld the shades of the carnal malefactors 

"When they arrive before the precipice, 

The infernal hurricane that never rests 
Hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine, 
Whirling them round, and smiting, it molests them,' 
and 

31 



THE INLAND SEA 

^'Hither, thither, upward, downward, drives them," 
than I sometimes see on my desert island. 
Like the blast of a trumpet, the wind rushes 
through the narrow space between the cliff 
and my hut. As fiercely, these winter nights, 
the storms of snow and sleet are whirled around, 
"upward, downward," and hurled back, and back 
again, from the face of the northern wall. 

"And thou in peaceful calm art sitting. 
While I rejoice in restless heels." 

Chiron's words are in my ears. Perhaps it 
was past wanderings that incline me now to 
this rest. Is there not somewhat, too, of the 
Chiron in every man? ''Jt is but the modern 
fool that goes abroad to stare at landscapes." 
Then the tramp and the Darby must quarrel 
it out. *'Now we have drunk the wine let us 
eat the glass," the sneer extends to the de- 
scriber, too, ''In peaceful calm art sitting" — 
then in mine hut, 0, hater of shams, the sneer 
is put aside. 

The landscape descriptions of Walter Scott? 
32 



THE INLAND SEA 

Did they not come from the inmost man? Their 
healthiness shall not be denied. And Goethe, 
too, the great admired, was he not of the 
band? Certainly he loved nature just as sin- 
cerely as any poet of the farther day, nor did 
he disdain to recall her. Shall we apply the 
taunt to these? Or to Miller, or Burns? And 
Kingsley — the minute philosopher — how true 
his words have rung! 

Clio, Thalia or Melpomene. 

The landscape story, is it not, also, an epic? 
If the elder poets enjoyed nature like the 
drinking of old wine, and yet remained silent 
— why did they sing of other human emotions? 
Or is it only praiseworthy, think ye, to sing 
of meaner things? Of wine, then, and sensual 
lust, whereof they sang too much? 

To night the wind roars. What care I? 
The louder the rumble in the spacious chim- 
ney, the brighter will burn my drift-wood fire. 
There is nothing to fear. One must oppose 
his resources to the blind anger of nature, 

6 

33 



THE INLAND SEA 

and trust, in the end, to prevail. What to me 
if the wind grows furious in its strength, and 
beats and clamors at window and door? What 
if the waves boom by the northern cliff? 
What if they roar again and drive the foam 
far up the sands of the little bay? What 
though the sleet and hail lash against the 
window panes? These are but to-be-expected 
phases of my hermit life, and ones to have been 
foreseen. Stir anew the embers of the smol- 
dering fire, let the red sparks fly; remember 
that thy food is safe cached, and that the hut 
is firm-planted and strong as the gale! 

For a homesteader, these are peculiar if not 
incongruous surroundings. Small cause does 
there seem for lament. If the hut is rough 
on the exterior, it is bright and cosy within. 
I look around the room and there is that in 
sight to both feed the mind and to please the 
eye. This is not a penitent's cell. When one 
goes into self- banishment, why not have his 
household gods around him? The German 
was right. One needs a focal point of con- 

34. 



THE INLAND SEA 

trast. Amid the tides of busy life, the bare 
apartment, the white- washed walls, were all 
sufficient. Here is a difference. The soul 
amid this barrenness yearns for the ideal, for 
the creations of art and imagination to fill the 
empty hours. Here one needs the complex; 
the outpourings of the human mind, food for 
the desires put into the blood and brain by 
thousands of years of luxury and civilization. 

Old days or new, hermits, the world over, 
are much the same. 

"Exalt, rapt, ecstatic," 

criminal and miser, each one must have his 
motive for body or for soul. 

"Most smiling, smooth, detested parasites!" 

No exalt I — no gold lies buried in these 
sands — nor with the misanthrope need I 
exclaim. 

To be of use, to reclaim the barren waste, 
to make sure in the future my daily bread. 
These, too, are among my thoughts. Posses- 
sion always gives a certain amount of pride 

35 



THE INLAND SEA 

and love, and over my island and desert acre- 
age, whereon the vine may yet grow, and 
where may yet resound the glad voices and 
laughter of woman and children, I look as 
fondly as ever does the family inheritor of 
broad estate. In the meantime, till such 
consummation come, why not enliven my vigil 
with pleasant labor? Why not fill it with 
enjoyment gleaned from the past? Why not 
enrich it with the wisdom of others? 

A bed — a bunk, I should say — shelving; a 
table — six feet of wide pine board, one edge 
fastened to the wall; a bench; a rack, formed 
from the skull of a mountain sheep, with 
curved and massive horns; my unused gun 
thereon, and a bin, and the means of cooking 
— these are part of my goods. On the other 
hand — realm of the mind — stands my easel. 
There is a statuette by Danneker — Ariadne — 
and a plate from Titian's Sacred and Profane 
Love. Close by the window, there hangs a 
portrait, with autograph attached, of a famous 
modern beauty, and over my bunk a large 
framed card: 

36 



TRE INLAND SEA 

*^ Avenue Villa, 50 Holland St., Kensington. 

Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall 

Greet their Friends 

On the 20th September, 1884, 

The Anniversary 

Of their bOth Wedding day— 

Their Golden Wedding." 

And a curtain of much-faded damask keeps 
from grime and from dust my allotment of 
books. Over all, articles of use and neces- 
sity, objects of taste and indulgence, a "chain- 
dropped lamp" sheds a mellow ray. 

I turn to my books. What a comfort it is, 
in a place like this, to have one's friends 
around him! In that construement I am not 
alone. There they stand, the glorious com- 
pany; silent, it is true, but ever ready to 
speak. It may be that one cannot hope to be 
their equals; yet they are ever ready to be 
the teachers. "Do you ask to be the compan- 
ions of nobles?" To this question, we may 
give an affirmative answer. In life, some of 
those who stand there so calmly, were un- 
known to each other, or perhaps they lived to 

37 



THE INLAND SEA 

be as enemies. Now they are friendly enough, 
side by side in their work of ministry. Some 
there were, who were "both actors and spec- 
tators too." Some wrought in solitude, and 
some amid the plaudits of the admiring world. 
And others, though they may have known it 
not, nor guessed what lay in the course of 
time — centuries, customs, evolutions, holding 
them apart — yet seem destined now to be 
linked as twin stars, or to shine in clusters, as 
Dante has grouped them in the world of 
shades. 

Who can tell where the written word shall 
be read? A singular place this — this lonely 
and desolate rock, engirdled by a wintry sea — 
in which to pursue the thoughts of those who 
once trod the classic vales of Hellas, or follow 
the lines of those who graced the court of 
Queen Bess. Within reach of my hand are 
the best results of the human mind, the work 
of the individual condensing the thoughts of 
the race. I have but to stretch forth my 
arm to annihilate ages. Homer, Virgil and 
Dante — these immortals are mine. I am 

38 



THE INLAND SEA 

taken to revel in Greece, and Rome and 
medigeval Italy. 

A voice sonorous, deep-toned as the sea, 

and those others, too, I hear. From the Iliad 
of the blind old man, from Ulysses' wanderings, 
I turn to him who sang of Mne&s, Prince of 
Troy, and to him, the world- worn, and his 
mystic song. To Italy, too, I am carried by 
the great Boccaccio, with his stories of un- 
dying fame. To Spain, Cervantes, with his 
Don Quixote, leads the way, Goethe, to Ger- 
many, through his perfected drama of Faust. 
For England there are Chaucer, Milton and 
Shakespeare; and for France, Moliere, Beranger 
and Chateaubriand. For men of action, there 
are Caesar and Humboldt, and as intermedi- 
ates, Gladstone and Heine lead the way to 
Thomas Carlyle, and he to Emerson. There is 
science, faith, history, fiction. From the 
noise of waves, my thoughts are carried to the 
din of arms. Through "battles, sieges, for- 
tunes," from countries of sunshine and pas- 
sion; from the land of old Omar's Rubaiyat, to 

39 



THE INLAND SEA 

those of the pallid north, I am transported in 
an instant, and this is accomplished by the 
Kalevala and Tegner's Siegfried's Saga. 

On the table lie a few de lux. The Deca- 
meron has the etchings — first impressions — 
of Leopold Flameng. The Lyrics have steel 
plates from the designs of Panquet, Jacque 
and Grenier. There are Suckling's Poems, 
with the portrait by Vandyke; Santine's 
Picciola, Herrick's Hesperides and Noble 
Numbers; old Pepy's Diary, and Walt Whit- 
man's Leaves of Grass. 

And among them, at the moment, like pil- 
grims who have lost their way, Architecture 
of the Heavens, by Nichol, and Lives of the 
most eminent Painters and Sculptors of the 
Order of S. Dominic. 

I turn to my books. When too much moved 
by the fire, the passion of Poe, I can change to 
the laughing moralities of Ingoldsby Legends. 
When wearied with the courtly, the sentitious 
sentences of the great Veralum, I can pass to 
the less golden wisdom of the grave Mon- 

4:0 



THE INLAND SEA 

taigne. From the study of "Ambition," and 
"Love" and "Fortune," short is the road to 
the caustic satire of "Miss Kilmanseg." But 
as with Barham I am best pleased in the end 
with the solemn tones of the "As I Lays 
A-thinkynge," so, at last, with Hood, I follow 
with beating heart the bitter pathos of "The 
Bridge of Sighs," and the self-probing stanzas 
of "The Haunted House." 

Of spectres, however, the Inland Sea is 
supposed to have one of its own. Not one 
self-conjured, but one ah extra. It is the 
grave-digger Jean Baptiste. Branded and 
shackled, the man himself was kept, it is said, 
a solitary prisoner on one of these islands. 
He attempted escape. By one of the river 
mouths, a skeleton was lately found, a fetter 
and link of chain were still on the ankle-bone. 
It was the remains of Jean Baptiste. He had 
met his death by drowning. 



41 



Wilt) an^ Win^^ fiDarcb 



II. 
mi\t> anD min^)^ fiDarcb 

Presto — transformation! What has done 
this? Is this the work of enchanter's wand? 
Can this be my island? The scene is changed, 
the place seems to have shifted its latitude, 
and to float in a southern clime. For many 
days, mankind and I have been strangers, but, 
lo! sociality has come to my door. But lately, 
too, I became hypochondriacal from enforced 
self-musings; now I loose myself in news of 
the world. The gloomy season is ended; there 
is spread the festal board; and welcome the 
turn of the year, but more welcome these 
sounds of glad human voices. 

A thrilling spectacle! Just now — at twi- 
light — the Inland Sea rages beneath a storm of 
the Vernal equinox. March brings in the 

45 



THE INLAND SEA 

spring and it comes in a fierce disorder. 
Grouped by the hut door we watch the storm. 
Hurrying from windward (N. W.) the waves in 
thick-set ranks, sweep past the cliff-head, and 
wildly burst on the island sands. Huge foam- 
globes, formed by the beating of the briny 
waves among the rocks, are cast adrift, and 
sent seawards by the changing wind. In this 
swift transition and extreme of effect, who 
would think that this island, knew such winter 
storms? In some respects it might be likened 
to an out-lying fragment of "sea-beat Hebri- 
des," but now with the distant shining of 
snow-covered peaks and the gleaming waters, 
it more closely resembles some lonely rock of 
Azores. 

There is plenitude of shipping. Beside the 
yacht, which arrived this noon with a wet 
deck and a tired crew, a fifty-foot schooner 
rides at anchor near by, my own small boat is 
dragged up the shore, and a little sloop — 
which parted her cable at the beginning of 
the storm — lies half wrecked on the island 

46 



THE INLAND SEA 

sands. Each wave that comes breaks anew 
the stranded boat, and from mast and rigging 
of schooner and yacht comes an answering 
whistle to the stormy blast. To the west- 
ward an angry blare of lurid color streams 
upward to the wind- torn clouds, and it finds an 
echo on the far-off Weber cliffs. In the north 
a strange crystalline light— amber through 
cobalt — illumines the air. To the eastward, 
the sky is all but cloudless. Across the water 
— of a cold and sheeny green — lies a length- 
ened trail of pallid gray. Dim and pale, the 
ghost of a dead world, the moon, lifts its round 
above the distant Wasatch, and stares at the 
wild unrest of this fierce and acrid sea. 

From this time on my hermitage will be of 
a mild and temperate kind. The guano sifters 
and I will be on the friendliest terms. Not a 
hundred yards away from my own, they are 
building for themselves a home. It is quite 
in contrast to this one of mine. It is long 
and narrow and is made of rounded slabs. 
Within the dwelling, the piled-up sacks of 

47 



THE INLAND SEA 

flour, the bags of beans, the boxes of candles, 
the flitches of bacon that hang from the 
rafters, and the pots, pans and kettles, and 
other necessaries of life, indicate a protracted 
stay. 

In more ways than one, I am pleased with 
my new companions. Beside the natural de- 
sire for fellowship, there is not to be forgotten 
the artistic selfishness. Men are often but 
figures to the landscape painter, and as it is 
impossible that I put myself into my own 
sketches, even were that feat desirable, I have 
sadly felt the want of flesh and blood. Man 
was needed to give interest to these waves 
and stones. Now he is here. These figures 
are perfect accompaniments to these island 
scenes. They are as much in harmony with 
these bird-haunted rocks as are the samphire- 
gatherers to the old-world cliffs. They are as 
valuable to me as the beach-comber is to the 
painter of marines, or as the charcoal burner 
to him who makes pictures of the oaks and 
firs of some forest dell. As Dickens uses the 

48 



THE INLAND SEA 

bit of dreary twilight landscape on the river 
Soane, to show the forlorn and desperate con- 
dition of the execrable Regaud, or as the 
desolate valley is made by Hugo to indicate 
the arid and lonely soul of Jean Valjean, 
when, after he has committed the robbery at 
the house of his benefactor, the good bishop, 
Monsieur Welcome, he sits down to rest, so I 
can use, in inverse ratio, these men. Emphasis 
they give, such as the landscape painter loves. 
Take the present moment. Three of the 
sifters are engaged in the task of passing 
through sieves and putting into sacks the 
ancient bird deposits. Leaning against the 
wild March wind, their rustic clothing flapping 
in as wild disorder, and a cloud of the brown, 
snuff-like mineral hovering around them, or 
being carried by the fitful gusts far beyond 
the sieves, the men make extremely pictur- 
esque figures. One of the sifters will dwell 
here permanently, I expect to place him 
into many a future sketch. He is a Hercules 
in strength and of brawny stature. He moves 
from place to place all unconscious, and of 

7 

49 



THE INLAND SEA 

course, uncaring, of his pictorial value to me. 
Despite the season, his head and shoulders are 
bare to the sun and wind, his feet are encased 
in coarse brown sacking; and, as I write, he 
is, with that exception, naked. He is carry- 
ing a plank to a couple of his fellow laborers, 
and these are busy at work on the recently 
stranded boat. His yellow hair, his ruddy 
flesh tints focus a picture in which the broken 
sloop, the big black schooner, the white hull 
of the yacht, the turquoise blue waters of the 
Inland Sea, the warm gray of the island cliffs, 
with the reeling clouds above them, are the 
splendid components. Only to realize to the 
full the effect of this momentary scene upon 
the mind, the describer must not omit the 
sounds. Two of my friends, with shouts and 
halloos, explore a corner of the transformed 
bay. There is a clattering of hammers made 
by the workmen overhauling the wreck; the 
dogs bark loud, and these united noises bring 
shrill, harsh cries from the island sea-birds, 
and these are answered in turn by a loud and 
indignant cackle from the sifter's score and 

50 



THE INLAND SEA 

two of newly-brought and astonished barn- 
yard fowls. 

After many days, we have just seen the 
island. Like life itself, an island — to be 
known— needs sometimes to be seen from 
without. Hitherto, I have seen my island too 
near. Gunnison, like many another, can only 
be known rightly by an encirclement on the 
water, when it falls somewhat into the retro- 
spect, and its parts, like events in our lives, 
are not out of proportion through the law of 
perspective. To appreciate this place as a 
piece of rude and sterile, but attractive scen- 
ery, one should see it from a boat's deck, and 
at a considerable distance away from the shore. 
Gunnison exhibits great diversity of forms, it 
contains heterogeneous material. On a limited 
scale — its shore line does not exceed three miles 
— it has miniature crags, bristling cliffs, sandy 
beaches, walls, pyramids, stacks, mounds, old 
molars of rock, fantastic forms innumerable. 
Of my neighboring islands, Strong's Knob is 
in form, perhaps, the boldest. Fremont — 

51 



THE INLAND SEA 

Disappointment— is dominated in appearance 
by its castle-shaped top. The name of Hat 
Island suggests its form, as well as does that 
of Dolphin. Carrington lies low on the water 
and appears much the same from each point 
of the compass. The sky line of Stansbury's 
and also of Church are quite of the grandest. 
Gunnison is merely a rising, a peak of the 
partially submerged Desert Range. It is a 
mass of black limestone, with longitudinal 
traversements of lava, with outer croppings of 
coarse conglomerate. It has no such tower, 
such domes as Stanbury's, no rocks like 
Church, no pebbles like Fremont, but in com- 
bination it outvies them all. One might im- 
agine that the Gunnison was designed to 
exemplify the sterner principles of the pic- 
turesque. 

To liken the profile of a cliff or mountain 
to that of a couchant lion is worse than trite. 
One discards the commonplace thought, yet 
such is the northern cliff. As one approaches 
the upper end of Gunnison Island from the 

52 



THE INLAND SEA 

west, the leonine image is strikingly perfect. 
No stretch of imagination is needed to piece 
out the fact. There lies the beast, his head 
to the north, his monstrous paws lying on the 
lower shelves, and below him the water is deep 
and richly blue. "Detached from the island, 
about a dozen rods or so away, are two large 
masses of rock and these are known as The 
Cubs; a most romantic little bay separates 
the pair, and their presence adds very mate- 
rially to the wildness of the scene around." 

As the Inland Sea contains not another 
island that is half as picturesque as this one, 
so there is not another within its bounds whose 
sombre features are enlivened by such a mul- 
titude of noisy life. In the season, this is the 
most frequented mating ground, and the bays 
are then inhabited by crowds of screaming 
sea-fowl. Erstwhile, too, the island was the 
home of pelican and heron, but the presence 
of man will keep those shy birds away. On 
the tops of the Sarcobatus bushes are still the 
deserted last year's nests of the herons, and 
where the waters of East Bay suddenly shallow 

53 



THE INLAND SEA 

upon a half-circle beach of sand, the homes 
of the pelicans were made. Here the gulls 
have nested for ages, nor do they appear dis- 
posed, now that man has appeared on the 
scene, to give up their ancient and natural 
rights. The wary pelicans, whose advance 
guards have been flying above the island for 
several days past, may abandon the field, but 
not so the gulls. On Hat Island — the satellite 
of Carrington — which the yacht so recently 
passed, the pelicans are now congregated by 
scores and hundreds. They have found a 
new place of abode; but already the gulls are 
taking their old positions to nest, and they 
fill each nook and corner of this disputed 
island with a constant and increasing din. 

No doubt but that the fantastic rocks 
jutting from the edge of Gunnison; its 
cliffs; its boulders, round as cannon balls; its 
shining sands, may be duplicated on many a 
seashore; but not so its wild background of 
desert and mountain. The wind that sent us 
along was a sparkler, and the changeful pan- 
orama of shifting distances, seen thus quickly, 

54 



J HE INLAND SEA 

showed all the varieties of the island itself. 
One thing was lacking, and that was the flash 
of a rival sail. Far as the eye could reach, 
not a sign of human life met our sight. The 
island huts, and the busy sifters came as a 
welcome change to the otherwise deserted 
shores. 

Hidden Valley, in yonder Wasatch, is the 
antipodes of my present home. Two deep 
canons of that lofty range begin on the side 
of a central peak, the which peak, we are told 
by those learned in the history of this old 
world of ours, was once a veritable island, 
first to rise above the waves of the primeval 
ocean, of all these western heights. Almost 
parallel in their courses, there stands between 
these neighboring passes a stupendous bar- 
rier of craggy mountain wall. Leading up 
to peaks still higher, and set like watch-towers 
along its way, are winding ridges, with knife- 
like edges, and overlooking wan ravines, all 
ragged and grizzly with thick-set spears of 
fractured stone. On the north side especially, 

55 



IHE INLAND SEA 

the wall is exceedingly grand. From time to 
time its already stupendous strength is aug- 
mented by mighty bastions, the tops of which, 
seen from below, appear to be the crests of 
the peaks themselves. To be exact, however, 
there are two rows of these bastions, one 
above and set back of the other, so that be- 
tween the tops of the lower row and the base 
of the higher, there lies a long narrow space 
at an elevation of ten thousand feet. This is 
the Hidden Valley. As now, I turn my glass 
toward the heights to seek the outline of 
familiar walls, so when there, with this same 
glass, I made out amid the distant waters this 
desert home. Perhaps a sojourn, a summer 
passed in that other place — that rocky basin 
held so near the sky — was a fitting prelude to 
these island days. 

Hidden Valley has a secret entrance. Its 
narrow doorway is between two boulders — 
huge quartzite monoliths, that like worn-out 
sphinxes, keep watch and guard. The ap- 
proach to Gunnison is across the broad waters, 
open on every side. The island rocks are 

56 



THE INLAND SEA 

marked horizontally by the waves of Bonne- 
ville, those of the valley are scratched diagon- 
ally by the ancient glaciers. Here I have 
built for myself a hut, and there I have lived 
in a cabin taken at second hand. This home 
is of stone, that one of unadzed logs with the 
moss and ferns between them. Here I wear 
a track for my feet, there the fallen pine-cone 
already sprouted on the unused pathway 
Here my bed is of blankets, there it was com- 
posed of pine-tips, luxurious and sweetly- 
perfumed as that of an Eastern King. There 
I thought of my predecessors, as here I often 
wonder who my successors will be. The brine 
which surrounds my island lies, as it were, in 
a grave, while the crystal waters of the 
Hidden Valley are held by the lofty mountains 
as in a font. Amid a grove of primeval trees, 
surrounded by the Wasatch summits, a sanct- 
uary seemed the one; a threshold seems this 
other. In point of difference, then, there was 
a moral as well as a physical one. 



57 



THE INLAND SEA 

"Behold a sower went forth to sow;" "The 
axe shall be laid at the root of the tree;" 
"Those who go down to the sea in ships." 
Unexpectedly, and by the sloop's mishap, I 
look upon one of the subjects — the wreck 
ashore — listed for the English sketcher by the 
Rev. J. G. Wood, M. A. Two of the distinc- 
tive happenings of March, however, I shall 
not see — the felling of timber, and the sow- 
ing of the soil. These sights may be indica- 
tive of the season's inspirations elsewhere, 
but are in nowise suggestive of those on this 
island. Here no tree makes ready to burst 
into leaf; in this rocky soil reposes no seed of 
food-bearing grasses. No matter how fiercely 
the winds of these Vernal storms may drive 
the waves, they but leave bare the rocks and 
sands, without casting up those heaps of kelp 
and tangle, so dear to the sketcher's eye. 

But lately I stood 

"Upon the beached verge of the salt flood." 

Even to the bleak, gray rocks at Isle of Shoals, 
the weeds of Atlantic give a rich-toned color. 

58 



THE INLAND SEA 

And by the western main how gorgeous the 
reefs and ledges! Skirt my island as oft as I 
will, my eyes shall see no such beauties as 
those. What to nature are our canons of art! 
Her contrasts are often most violently given. 
Such, by that cast, was the sunlit grass, the 
deep blue sky, the flaming lines of the golden 
poppies, and the massed verbenas on the shin- 
ing dunes. 

" 'Tis the hard gray English weather 
Breeds the hard gray Englishmen." 

If I am to be contented here, I must forget 
those things. I must forget how the scarlet 
star-fish clung to the granite, the wine-purple 
sea-urchin lay on the sands; and how in each 
rock-girt pool, the sea-anemone unfolded its 
living flowers. It will not do to remember, 
how, when the tide was out, I teased the big, 
petulant crabs, gathered the tent shaped 
limpet, and picked up the geranium-leaf shell 
and the Venus Cradle; did a hundred child- 
ish things, in short, until I was sent back to 
land, chased by wind, and rain and tide. But 

59 



THE INLAND SEA 

everywhere is material for pleasure, if only we 
see aright. 

Carrion of some kind has drifted ashore. 
On the lesser Cub, the ravens are busy about 
it. This reminds me that their cousins, the 
crows, and the blackbirds, too, are even now 
disputing with the island gulls for spoil in the 
wake of the plow. Being wingless, I cannot 
pass as do these. The winged marauders are 
ever passing from island to shore, and return- 
ing again in swift unwearied flight. How 
bounteous in yonder eastern valleys will be 
the season's prime! In the village orchards, 
the trees, — the peach, the plum, the apple 
and the pear — will cover their branches with 
clouds of predictive bloom. The village chil- 
dren will roam the uplands, and return with 
garlands of woven flowers. On the Wasatch, 
too, and the other ranges, what wonders there 
will be. What great star-dashes, what rhom- 
boids, what circles, what wavering belts of 
brilliant flowers! There will be Ranunculus, 
Saxifraga and Primula; the Rosaceae, Felices, 

60 



THE INLAND SEA 

Lycopadicse; all the bewildering variety of 
the alpine flora. The yet unmelted snows in 
their downward course will lave what unseen 
gardens! Not a glade or glen but shall know 
its tens of thousands. Simply a matter of a 
few thousand feet, and what a change is there! 
Where one flower is starved to death another 
grows in opulence. The common dog-rose, 
though on the heights the bush itself is 
dwarfed and flattened to the ground, bears a 
bloom much larger than on the lower levels, 
and richer too, is its sweet perfume. Upon 
the heights within my daily sight, will come 
forth the flowers of myth and legend, there 
will grow strange western bloom, and there 
the wild flowers that for endless generations 
have been dear to the old world heart and 
brain. Cooled by the crystal rills, warmed by 
the generous sun, the mountains will break 
into floral joy. In the Hidden Valley will 
grow those flowers, the descendants of others 
that bloomed upon the self same spot, century 
beyond century of the past, and unseen by 
human eyes. By lake, in grove and glen, will 

61 



THE INLAND SEA 

grow the columbines, the asters, the wan, pale 
orchids, the golden bunches of bright ivesia. 
There will be the phlox, the troops of solemn 
Monk's Hood, the waving fields of blue mer- 
tensias. As time goes on, the pale, blanched 
hue of the velvet clematis will show against 
the deep- gold shining of the glacial rocks, and 
Parry's Primula; a ne plus ultra to the climber 
for western flowers will open its corolla of 
crimson-purple with yellow eye. I shall have 
visions, too, of those grassy meadows, where 
comes forth that erratic flower Dodecatheon 
Meadia; variety Alpinus — the American cow- 
slip or shooting star. There at morn from 
grass- hidden larks will come bubbles of melo- 
dious sound. The hermit thrush and the 
purple-finch will utter their soft love warblings 
and tender calls. Throughout the day the 
hummer, the bee and the butterfiy, will make 
their quest together, and in the gloaming, as 
Hesperus hangs above the craggy walls, the 
vesper sparrow will sing its tuneful song. 
"Aloft the mountain lawn is dewy-dark, 
And dewy-dark aloft the mountain pine." 

62 



THE INLAND SEA 

On my island, the vines will sprout, I hope; a 
cactus or two will unfold their fleshy blossoms, 
there may be the serrated disc of a desert 
primrose, and on the upper rocks, the moss 
and lichen may take on, perhaps, a brighter 
hue. Here I shall watch, but little will I see. 
The aged artemesia will throw out new shoots: 
there may be a thistle here and there among 
the ledges, and I may find some hitherto 
unknown, some pungent and nameless desert 
flower. Here, too, the grease-wood will send 
out its spiky leaves, the salt- weed come up by 
the shore, and the brush-grass green awhile 
the slant of the cliffs. Hardly enough, this, 
to satisfy the soul, when one thinks of the 
exuberance of the fields and woods elsewhere, 
and longs to see the full miracle of the spring's 
return. 

Yet I have compensations. Would I have 
come hither, and would I remain as I do, did 
I not know that such would be given? Stans- 
bury records his first impressions of the Inland 
Sea. Not so showy a picture as some others, 
but still enough. He was surprised to find, 

63 



THE INLAND SEA 

although so near a body of the saltest water, 
none of that invigorating freshness which is 
always experienced in the vicinity of the 
ocean. "The bleak and naked shores," he goes 
on to say, "without a single tree to relieve the 
eye, presented a scene so different from that 
I had pictured in my imagination, that my 
disappointment was extreme." So it has been 
with me, but since my first view of the place, 
I have been taught. Spring finds out this 
desolate spot as surely as those more favored. 
I shall see the great phenomena of nature, 
although its manifestations may be affected 
by local conditions. Here March as well de- 
serves the name which the old Saxons gave 
it— i. e., noisy month — as along the English 
coast. It is just as violent, just as brusque, 
and the winds bluster, and the waves dash, 
and the wild clouds send their shadows career- 
ing across sea and land. The interior basin 
has a character of its own, and nowhere does 
it show more strongly than here where I 
stand. It has not, it may be, such scenes to 
show as where the gray, Atlantic frets on its 

61 



THE INLAND SEA 

shores, or where, by the side of the vast 
Pacific, the cypress trees 

" spread their umbrage broad 

And brown as evening." 

I shall see no such copious falls of rain, nor 
such effects as when those western mists are 
being dispelled by a rising sun, and floating 
away in diaphanous veils they let the sun pour 
down his rays, hot through the humid atmos- 
phere. In the clear, dry air above the Inland 
Sea, the vast, white cone of the zodiacal light 
streams up over my island cliffs, far more 
brilliantly in the twilight than it does through 
the skies of Britain. A mighty sign. The 
Scales, hangs radiant above the Wasatch range. 
Like a wondrous torch, Venus, beneficent star, 
burns amid the failing glow, and unobscured 
by fog or mist, Orion, in golden splendor, 
leads his dogs, Sirius and Proycon, beyond 
the edge of the solitary desert. 

We all know of the false dawn. It is seen 
more fully in the lands of the East. Here at 

9 

65 



TEE INLAND SEA 

the beginning of March was that effect which 
might fitly be termed a false spring. Up in 
the Hidden Valley, I knew of approaching 
storm by the moving, the soft clashing of 
those green and silver shields, the leaves of 
the aspen, or by the dog-fish that congregated 
in groups along the lake shores, their black, 
ugly muzzles resting on some sunken log, or 
crumbling bit of shale, staring stupidly up at 
the sky. Here a wind, treacherous and soft 
as the subtle Vivian, caressed the land; and 
as though made of pearl and burnished silver 
shone the passing clouds. Lovely tints of 
azure and green lay pale on the placid water, 
and the mountains, like vast crumpled fold- 
ings of cream-colored silk, stood shimmering 
along the horizon. One would have thought 
that the time was truth itself. Look where 
one would, was a seeming presence of spring. 
All of this; yet once again the wild March 
blizzards come sweeping out of the north. To 
make good the old adage, the salt spray was 
whirled across the island from side to side; 
the wet sleet clung to the face of the rocks, 

66 



TBE INLAND SEA 



the waves broke seething over the backs of 
The Cubs, and the foam leaped half way up the 
breast of The Lion, the great northern cliff. 



67 



lander tbe Dog Star 



III. 
iHn^cv tbe Dog Star, 

My days of trial are here. The King of 
Suns, the mighty Sirius, the fiery Dog- Star of 
the ancients, rules the sky. the insufferable 
brightness! the glare of light upon the 
waters of the Inland Sea! My eyes ache. 
Like a vast mirror of polished steel gleams 
the briny surface; and across it, the sun's path 
is like that same steel at a molten heat. 
Asia, Africa — where could this not be? A 
wind hot as the sirocco withers the scanty 
herbage. My brain seethes. Through the 
smalltst aperture, sun- arrows pierce into the 
darkened room. In the tanks the water yet 
keeps pure, but I grow fearful lest too quickly 
it should shrink away. These are the days 
when the temper becomes uncertain, when 

71 



THE INLAND SEA 

indolence and passion hold equal sway. Now 
the heat of that distant sun gathers in the 
veins, and the blood boils. We are made the 
playthings of combustion taking place innu- 
merable miles away. Now the poet's eye is 
in a fine frenzy rolling; the musician hears the 
music of the spheres. Now men of nobleness, 
en rapport with stellar fires, are roused to great 
achievements, or those of lower instincts are 
moved to deeds of crime. Now, when too 
bitter the wormwood in the cup of sorrow, 
one must cry out like John in the wilderness, 
or the delicate brain gives way to madness in 
the fierce disquiet of the time. 

"The heart- sick," says Poe, "avoid distant 
prospects. In looking from the summit of a 
mountain one cannot help feeling abroad in 
the world. Grandeur in any of its moods, but 
especially in that of extent, startles, excites 
— and then fatigues. For the occasional 
scene, nothing can be better — for the constant 
view, nothing can be worse. And in the con- 
stant view, the most objectional phase of 

72 



THE INLAND SEA 

grandeur is that of extent, the worst phase 
of extent that of distance." 

And the words of Poe are true. Unless I 
fear not to invite the pain of dejection, I keep 
away from the peak. I have discovered that 
on the summit of the cliff, I cannot escape 
from that feeling "abroad" of which the 
poet speaks. Not only is dejection there 
invited, but also is added thereunto the irony, 
as it were, of publicity. There my feelings 
are "at war with the sentiment and sense of 
seclusion." Strange to relate, the further I 
see from my place of exile, the more unhappy 
I grow. Melancholy, impossible to turn aside, 
steals over me^at sight of those vast stretches 
of sullen water and those miles of arid land. 
Nor is it the character merely of the sea and 
landscape that works the depression; its 
cause takes deeper root in the soul. Standing 
in the crow's-nest erected by Stansbury, my 
island lies around me like a colossal map in 
relief. Beyond the waters are the endless 
mountains; beyond the mountains, the open 
skies. There are mountains near, and moun- 

10 

73 



THE INLAND SEA 

tains distant. There is limitless recurrence of 
slope and peak and gorge. Range behind 
range the heights culminate in level, in curve, 
and dome, or in jagged saw-tooth edge along 
the horizon. A hundred miles of the Wasatch 
mountains occupy but a fragment of the vast 
circumference. Westward is the white, trem- 
ulous line of the awful desert. Vastness and 
strangeness are the view's leading features, 
and worse than these are the powers of 
memory and assimilation. To the inner eye, 
this enlarges the horizon a hundred fold. 
Rather than be a slave too long to the infinite 
in the finite, one tries to concentrate his 
attention upon some petty object, to shrink 
into one's self and find rest for a m.oment in 
anchoring the mind to some near rock or 
shrub. But all in vain. Instinctively, as 
through a resistless fascination, the gaze 
wanders once more. No rest, no ceasing. 
Again one looks around and around, across and 
across the unfriendly waters. At last, against 
all efforts of will, a plunge into the deep, 
unfathomable, the alluring and dreadful blue. 

74 



TRE INLAND SEA 

"Is it the climate? Is it the marvelous 
sky?" Hugo exclaimed so, when he learned 
of the death of Count Bresson. "A brilliant 
and a joyous sky mocks us! Nature in her 
sad aspect resembles us and consoles us. 
Nature when radiant, impassive, serene, mag- 
nificent, transplendent, young while we grow 
old, smiling while we are sighing, superb, 
inaccessible, eternal, contented in its joyous- 
ness, has in it something oppressive." 

"Hateful is the dark-blue sky, 
Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea." 

In the laureate's verse we catch an echo of 
a similar strain. "People," says Amiel, "talk 
of the temptation to crime connected with 
darkness, but the dumb sense of desolation 
which is often the product of the most brilli- 
ant moment of daylight, must not be forgotten 
either. Man feels lost and bewildered, a 
creature forsaken by all the world." 

In the heart of these crystal days there 
lurks an awful thought. Today the same as 
yesterday; that like the day before; tomorrow 



THE INLAND SEA 

but to carry forward the monotony of pain. 
In this guise, life and infinity, you are 
scarcely to be borne. 

Bird- voices grow monotonous. I am berated 
from morning till night. The gulls never tire 
of screaming defiance. Go where I will, they 
greet me with cries of resentment. Not con- 
tent with this, they wait not my advent, but 
come uttering querulous calls or insulting 
notes to my very door. It is painful to be so 
very unpopular. Plainly, the sifters and I act 
the part of usurpers. The island belongs to 
the gulls by the right of inheritance. They 
are the original settlers, the ancient possessors, 
and fain would they give me the word of 
ejectment. What shall I do? The birds are 
not unheedful of the morsels that come from 
my table. They dart for whatever I throw in 
the air. But they love me, alas! none the 
more. With that enchantingly graceful wing- 
motion of theirs, they wheel in air, keeping 
a watchful eye upon my every action. Are 
their throats never weary? My dogs may 



THE INLAND SEA 

bay the moon, the owl on the cliff may scatter 
demoniac laughter, but they cannot out-noise 
these obstreperous gulls. For the third part 
of a year now, I have listened to their cease- 
less clamor. Do they never sleep? Their 
cries greet the dawn, and fail not at eve. 
Neither are they absent at noon of the day, 
nor at mid of night. Among the male birds 
themselves there is often a battle royal, and 
then what frenzied accompaniment of wing- 
flashings and inarticulate sounds of sexual ire. 
There are duels to the death. Perhaps it is 
some detail of natural selection. Perhaps it 
is some young lover overcoming the old. It 
may be two young lovers contending for the 
fairest of gulls. 

'^The charms for which (^ulls) strive or hopeless 
die." 

Or it may be a struggle that may yet 
involve all the young warriors of the rival 
colonies. The birds are clanish. The males 
of Bird-Rock keep a jealous eye upon those 
of the East, and those again, upon those of the 

77 



THE INLAND SEA 

South, and South-East Bays. My island has its 
Iliads, too. Perhaps this is a war over some 
winged Helen, or it may be that some Guin- 
evere of the gulls has been false to her lord. 
Often the males may be seen in groups, and 
then I try to pick out the Agamemnon, the 
Ajax, the injured Menaulus, or mayhap, the 
sage Ulysses, or the aged Nestor of the 
convocation. This colony, no doubt, is as 
ancient as Tyre, its laws unalterable as those 
of the Medes and Persians. The voices can 
grow plaintive, too. With almost human 
distinctness, comes at times the sudden and 
piercing call, H-e4-p! — h-e-l-p! — h-e-l-p! What 
a wild appeal! In the dead of the night, now 
from one distant corner of the island, now 
from another, and each and every time with 
an intensity of sound as from a soul in pain; 
one might fancy that the spooks were abroad, 
or, as a nearer cry is followed by a whispering 
sound, like voices suppressed in expectation, 
that some evil creatures were trying to lure 
one toward and then over the edge of the cliff. 
But it is only the birds. 

78 



THE INLAND SEA 

Am I becoming a metaphysician? Shall I 
degenerate to a belief in transmigration? Or 
shall I preach to the birds as did St. Francis 
of Assizi? There is delirium, too, in these 
lustrous nights as well as in these torrid days. 
Too closely those golden meshes of shining 
orbs seem to wrap around one; too multi- 
tudinous, they reflect in the shining wave. 
Those creatures, whose forms are ever in my 
sight, whose voices are ever in my ears, are 
they other than kindred transformed? How 
like the ways of the world are the ways of 
these feathered citizens! How like the ways 
of the world is their senseless jeering. What 
possible use is there in such a blind deridence? 
Yet to be thus hated and feared must work 
its effect. In this colony of birds as in a 
village of men, one feels the weight of 
continual disdain. After all comes the ques-. 
tion — Is it a difference, or is it a degree? 
Poor birds! shall I mock at their ways, at 
their loves, or their wrangles? at such pleas- 
ures and fears as they foolishly know? 

But a month since, and the downy young 

79 



THE INLAND SEA 

gulls were my best of friends. As I lay on the 
sands, they would come chirping toward me. 
Often has the lapel of my open coat sheltered 
the little chicks, and in the tunnel of my 
sleeve they would creep and hide. On a 
time, they have nestled in perfect confidence 
against my hand, my cheek, or my hair. 
Unlike the queer little herons, ridiculous 
younglings of poetic parents, the infant gulls 
have shown neither spite nor fear. I have 
known and loved these birds from the egg. 
Are there not among them those whose lives I 
have saved? Have I not rescued them from 
the waters of the briny sea? When faint and 
weary they could no longer struggle against 
the wave that engulfed them, I have lifted 
them forth and returned them to the shelter 
of the mother's wing. But now they are 
fearful; they are filled with a dark mistrust. 
Already, they watch and cower in my presence, 
or, with soft plaintive cry and faint flutter of 
half-fledged wings, run in crowds on the sands 
before me. When guided into some cul du sac 
of the cliffs, there is something uncanny 

80 



THE INLAND SEA 

and disturbing in the stare of their yellow 
eyes. 

"Thanks. WhaVs the matter you dissentious 
rogues?" 

Why, you distracted parents, put you to my 
nocturnal wanderings, this frightful din? 
Think you that I am a keeper in the limbo 
for birds? Scream your loudest; as regards 
to me, your progeny is safe. How like a 
white, fallen cloud appear your hosts on the 
starlit water! Or, indeed, as I retrace my 
steps to the hut, I could think you, as slowly 
again you approach the shore, a fleet of fairy 
gondolas, messengers from an unknown land. 

^'Latet anguis in herhaJ' Yes, that is true. 

In the grass is the snake, but here my foes 

come out of the dust. Of what avail then, 

this girdle of waters, this remoteness from 

men? Nowhere shall one escape his portion 

of dole. The fanged and deadly rattlesnake, 

I have seen it on yonder land, and its young, 

too. Like the infant viper, described by 
ti 

81 



THE INLAND SEA 

White, the offspring of evil raised its tiny 
head, and although, perhaps, as yet unarmed 
with poison, gave me proof, not unheeded, 
that it sensed its natural weapon. And these 
foes on my island, too, they are quick to 
strike. 

A coup de soleil — why not? The thunder 
mutters; the giant cumeli dazzle the eyes 
with the light upon them. They come, they 
grow, they melt in the sultry air. Afar in 
the land is the quiver of diffused lightnings, 
or the jagged bolt strikes to the earth 
without rain. Dark from excess of bright- 
ness, the denuded mountains take on that 
solemn hue which tells of middle summer. 
What Libyan days are these? Why falls not 
the moisture from yonder heaven? 0, the 
too-conscious me — the troublesome I! Can 
one meet this and be sane? Blaze forth, 
sun! Scorch with thy beams this shadeless 
isle, make flash again this shining sea! The 
seismic forces are troubled in their sleep. 
Blaze forth, sun — in a million wombs, life 

82 



THE INLAND SEA 

quickens to action, in countless graves, the 
dead decay! In this silence is every sound — 
the dirge, the rhapsody, the fantasia, the song 
of hope. In the heart-furnace sun, the 
fever is high as thine! 

This morning the first thing which I saw, as 
I awoke in my hammock, was a half- grown 
scorpion. As the villainous creature passed 
across a corner of my bamboo pillow, and but 
a few inches away from my face, the sight 
was unexpected and a somewhat startling one. 
Yesterday, one of the same objectionable 
neighbors climbed to a place at the board. A 
wicked-appearing scamp he was, as he after- 
wards lay, a prisoner and with sting erected, 
at the bottom of a china bowl. I have de- 
cided on a scorpion hunt. The guano-sifters 
will join in the sport. They have received 
similar visits to mine, and our brotherhood 
sympathies with the natural owners of this 
island do not lead so far as to make us risk a 
poisonous stab in the dark. It is remarkable, 
the number of lizards that have so quickly 

83 



THE INLAND SEA 

appeared. Among the volcanic rocks, so 
hot these days that they blister the hand if 
touched, they absorb comfort and happiness, 
and everywhere their erratic tracks make 
hieroglyphics upon the burning sands. The 
air, too, and the water are filled with the 
ministers of torment. An incredible number 
of gnats infest the shore, and where a few 
stunted bushes stand near the water's edge, 
they are covered thick with a veil of cobwebs; 
the big, fat spiders making the beach there a 
place to be avoided. These meridian days 
make hard indeed my island hermitage. 

Thirst! This sea would let one die of 
thirst. But little succor would be found in 
the small condensing apparatus which fore- 
thought made me bring. "Ropy," this is the 
description my companions give of the water 
supply in their barrels. What of my tanks? 
'Tis a timely reminder. A little charcoal will 
do them no harm, I will try my skill as a 
burner. I've a stranded cedar, and some 
Gunnison clay will do the rest. 

8i 



THE INLAND SEA 

Just after my first cruise on the Inland Sea, 
a boat containing one person was wrecked on 
the lower west shore of Antelope Island. I 
recall his experience as a what-might-be. 
The man who was thrown on Antelope Island 
was an expert sailor, so it was said, and one 
who should not have met with mischance. 
Starting alone, from the resort at Garfield 
Beach, to cross the southern end of the sea 
to a landing place on the eastern shore, 
adverse winds carried him too far to the 
north. In the darkness, for the trip was a 
night one, the winds having increased until 
the boat was beyond his control, it was driven 
upon the rocks, where the waves soon tore it 
apart. Not knowing the island to be inhabited 
— on its eastern side — the unfortunate voyager 
was in a sorry plight. He passed the follow- 
ing day after the wreck in searching for 
water along the western shore; a shore where 
not a drop of fresh water is to be found. By 
the merest chance, he was rescued from a 
painful death, not on the first day, however, 
but on the second, when he was in an 

85 



THE INLAND SEA 

exhausted and delirious condition. Had it not 
been for the depredations of a wild beast, the 
man would probably not have escaped at all. 
A wild cat had committed repeated trespass 
upon the poultry of the Island Farm, and a 
couple of young men were in quest of the 
thief. Their astonishment at finding an 
unknown man — a cast-away — lying alone on 
the hills, apparently in a dying condition, was 
as great as their appearance upon the scene 
was fortunate. 

Once a flock of sheep perished of thirst on 
the Fremont Island. That place, at certain 
times of the year, bears an abundance of rich, 
sweet bunch-grass, and the sheep had been 
left there for their winter pasturage. The 
poor sheep, victims of the short sightedness 
of their careless shepherd, died the death 
which the man escaped. There is a spring on 
the island, or at times there is, that flows 
forth from the rocks beneath a steep bank on 
the northern shore. The change in the sea's 
surface varies at times, and the spring is 
sometimes buried beneath the waves. On 

86 



THE INLAND SEA 

this occasion, such a rise had mingled the 
fresh waters with those of the brine. "In 
the agony of thirst," said the one who told 
me the tale, "the poor creatures pawed furi- 
ously at the barren shingle, fresh victims 
continually being added to the number of 
dead already lying around the spot." With 
throat parched and burning, my companion 
and I could well sympathize with the tortured 
animals. Seeing that our own quest for 
water was fruitless here, we hurried again to 
our boat, and rowed to the nearest water that 
we knew of, that of a spring near Promontory. 

Generous boon! My place of refuge is in 
my tub. I enjoy to the full the delights of 
the bath. When on land it seems that one 
must suffocate, that in the intolerable noon 
the rocks must melt, there is comfort in the 
cooling wave. Even the iron strength of the 
brawny sifter does not prevent his desire to 
become amphibious. Like myself, he lives as 
much in the water as he does on the land. 
What a great sanitarium this sea must become! 

87 



THE INLAND SEA 

Let the sun scorch never so; let the acrid 
waters shrink up the grass and the herbage; 
let it breed the gnat or strew the beach with 
larvae; yet in it there is renewed strength, a 
tonic for mind and body. To the tired limbs, 
it brings a rest, and to the wearied brain, 
repose. 

And here is my tub: distant from the hut 
some five hundred yards or so, at the base of 
a square piece of masonry, an abutment of 
the northern cliff, where, when the sea is 
rough, and the wind from the north, the 
eddies swirl, there is worn in the rock a 
smooth, round basin. Other basins of a 
similar kind are to be found along the shore, 
but this one remains my favorite still. It is 
some twenty-five feet across, and about five 
feet deep, and the bottom is covered with a 
layer of white and shining sand. 

A delicious place, one that annuls the 
physical sufferings of these trying days. 
There I go, and there I sport at my ease. 
The strong brine of the sea has a tendency 
to float one's limbs to the surface, so that the 



THE INLAND SEA 

sensation produced when one is in the water 
is always as novel as pleasant. When the 
sea is in anywise calm, it is an easy matter to 
recline thus for an indefinite length of time; 
but when the sea is rough, it is very difficult 
to make headway against the smallest of 
waves. 

Boyton, the swimmer, learned this. His 
exhibition of skill at Garfield Beach, on June 
12, 1886, was a most signal failure. The 
waves knocked him about at their will. Of 
all his aquatic adventures, the one most 
thrilling, so he afterwards declared, was that 
on the Inland Sea. 

I am in my tub. Somnolence broods wide 
over land and sea. The hot air swoons. The 
motionless water lies pale and unsullied. Not 
a troublesome gnat is abroad from the shore. 
The gulls, whom I disturbed as I walked 
through their colony, have sunk back to their 
nests. Some ten score or more of the startled 
birds who took flight to the bay, now float 
with head below wing. A pair of lizards comci 

89 



THE INLAND SEA 

out from under a stone, and, sleeping, bask on 
the sands. 

Across the distance, there comes a change. 
The horizon is melted away; the mountains 
are blurred. The farther chains appear to 
part, to become peaked islands. The sky 
seems water, the water, sky. Substance and 
shadow are indistinguishable. Do I wake or 
dream? — it is the beginning of a noon-day 
mirage. 



90 



IDotce of tbe Swan 



IV. 

Dolce of tbe Swan 

The late October! The Moon of Harvest 
has supplanted the Moon of Fire. For more 
than a month huge smoke-columns stood along 
the horizon, and by night across the waters 
was reflected a dull, red glow. It was the 
evidence of conflagration among the moun- 
tain oaks and pines. Now on my island the 
tall, coarse grasses, scorched stiff by the past 
heat, are whitened each morning with a heavy 
rime. Long since, the old and the gray- 
winged gulls have flown. There is silence 
around, but from the sky there falls, softened 
by distance, the dissonant clang of migrating 
geese, and once I heard, a sound to stir the 
blood as one listened, the long, rich call of the 
southward-flying swan. 

93 



THE INLAND SEA 

With shortened days and a lowered temper- 
ature, there has been ushered in a subdued 
and gloomy splendor. Its full emblazon of 
effect is not made by local color, but comes 
as much and more from a low and autumnal 
sun. From the affluence of the heavens there 
comes a transfiguration. Alwaj's, there are 
the same great stretches of water, always the 
same monotonous and dreary hills, ever the 
same strange walls of the far-off desert, and 
ever the same clustered multitude of mountain 
peaks. But how the seasons and the great 
sun play with them! They are ever the 
same, yet never the same, eternal yet evan- 
escent, playmates with time and with the 
elements. 

There are days and there are days. Either 
it is magnificent cloud-scapes over hurried 
waters and driven foam, or else it is, as now, 
the deep painting of tranquil skies and their 
reflection in the Inland Sea. With September's 
coming, a mighty drowsiness fell over the land. 
Again my island appeared to have shifted its 
latitude and floated to another clime. Through 

94 



THE INLAND SEA 

my glass, I brought near such especial spots 
of brightness as attracted the eye, and found 
them to be some lonely oak- clump or some 
spring-fed maple. Ruddy indeed, like a weary 
and belated sun, rose the autumn moon, and 
like a vast Koh-i-noor, the sun itself, big and 
yellow, marked the course of the year. Haze- 
enwrapped were the Wasatch and the fair 
Onaqui. Through deepening shades of a sad- 
dened violet, the Oquirrhs had lapsed into 
melancholia. The jutting headlands, the 
nearer islands, appeared as if cut from dim, 
orange crepe, or maroon-colored velvet, and 
greenish-gray shadows lay wan in cleft and 
ravine. Even on my island, the frost found 
some leaves to transform, and made fiery spots 
along its deserted shores. 

One more turn and the present richness of 
the time will be gone. This second effect of 
autumn, with all its wonderful depth and 
Bumptuousness of blended color, is of short 
duration. It marks the time between the 
heavy sensuousness, the lassitude of the 

95 



THB INLAND SEA 

so-called Indian Summer, and those days of 
November when, — 

" the far mountains wax a little hoary, 

And clap a white cap on their mantles blue." 

It is to the season, as is the mildness of the 
twilight hour. Had J. B. Pyne, the old English 
landscape painter and theorist, been here in 
September, he could have seen around him, on 
gigantic scale, his five triangled star. Here 
was an exemplification of his scheme of rela- 
tionship, opposition, and subordination of 
color. The full chromatic scale was given. 
There were the grouped triads of primaries, 
secondaries, tertiaries and quadrates. The 
whole scene glowed, though subdued with 
distance. Among the foliage, all the hues had 
come, excepting, of course, the blue, and that 
was supplied by the deeps of the sky. There 
were the red, the yellow, the blue; there, also, 
the orange, the green and the purple, and 
these were shot through, in nature's warp, 
with the citrines, the russets and olives. 
From this spot, I watched the spring climbing 

96 



THE INLAND SEA 

the heights, and now I have seen the autumn 
come, as it were, from above. The season is 
much more advanced, of course, upon the 
mountain tops, than it is upon this, or the 
other low-lying islands. One peculiarity of 
my position here, was to find myself within a 
circle of changing colors, to see the whole 
distant landscape smolder with undertones, 
and here and there the ruddy flames burst 
forth. To see the foliage turn its hue in an 
hour, and to watch the circle of frost-made 
colors ever expanding downward and around, 
kindling now the chaparral on some highest 
hill top, and then another; crowding through 
the canons, those ways of the hills, until it 
invaded the lower valleys and paused at the 
water's edge. 

Contrasted with the foothills of the Alle- 
ghany, or even with the seaward slopes of 
the Sierra Nevada, how barren are these 
interior bench-lands! I miss the huge old 
beech trees of the east; the hemlocks and 
the tamarack, or, in lieu of these, the live 

13 

97 



THE INLAND SEA 

oaks that fret with their roundness the 
western slopes. 

Yet noble is the scene these mountains show; 
The groves of spruce and fir hang high in air, 
Deep and firm-rooted on the great cliffs where 
Steeply they lean remote. 

For it is in the caiions, or in the steep 
ravines, or hidden among the canon heads, 
that the natural foliage of these mountains 
is found. Up in the hollows a wonderful 
sight may be seen, it is the frost-stricken 
leaves of the aspens. Nothing of autumn 
could be more lovely than these. Seen in the 
groves, each tree is perfect — a picture in 
itself. The eye there takes cognizance of 
each silver-green shaft, each erratic branch, 
and each separate, amber-gold leaf, as it 
quivers against the dark background of sub- 
alpine fir. But now I view from the synthetic 
standpoint. Soon all that brilliance will be 
stripped from the trees and made sodden 
upon the ground. The rocks at the cafion 

98 



THE INLAND SEA 

mouths will be covered a foot thick with the 
fallen leaves. 

"Girds with one flame the countless host" 

Emerson's line might apply to autumn. The 
Father of American verse was an autumn lover, 
as indeed were all of the New England poets. 
Eliminate from the pages of the most noted 
authors in prose and verse, those passages 
referring to the season of haze and color, and 
what a loss were there! It would take away 
much that is most pleasing and original in 
the national literature. It was the pictures 
of autumn, too, that first made American 
landscape art noticed across the seas. "It 
would be easy by a process of word-daubing,'' 
says Hawthorne, "to set down a confused group 
of gorgeous colors, but there is nothing of the 
reality in the glare which would be thus 
produced. They seem — the trees — to be 
some kindred to the crimson and gold clad 
islands. In its absence one doubts whether 
there be any truth in what poets have told 
about the splendors of the American autumn, 

tL.ofCJ 



THE INLAND SEA 

but when the charm is added, one feels that 
the effect is beyond description." 

And o'er the purplish, brownish, sensuous tone 
OJ distant woods, is dashed a dusky gold. 

All the glories of the sunset skies seem fallen 
upon the trees. There are the purple, the 
crimson, the scarlet and the gold, all the 
colors that burn upon the far-away clouds. 
Indeed, we touch them with our hands; but, 
ah! it must be confessed, no longer making us 
think of the raiment of the cherubim, but 
rather of the earthly robes of queens and 
kings. I love to see the sun send its rays 
parallel down some tree- crowded ravine and 
fill the leaves with a splendid light. But quite 
as well I love to see the far spirituality of 
color, and the autumnal procession of radiant 
clouds. 

The sea is much shrunken. Not even the 
last long fall of rain has lifted its surface to 
the normal level. Sand-bars, long and narrow, 
lace the shallow brine. Strong's Knob is now 

100 



THE INLAND SEA 

not an island, but a sand-girdled cape. Church 
Island and Stansbury, and Black Rock, too, 
are all joiDed by natural causeways to the 
land on the south. Gunnison stands in the 
deepest water, still its reefs stretch out 
farther than usual, and its outline of shore 
is affected as is an ocean island by a fall of 
the tide. Along the desert shore, the quiet 
fluid, green and transparent today, appears 
more like a plain of ice, than it does like a 
surface of water. Once it was thought that 
the Inland Sea was drained of its surplus 
waters — that furnished by rains and the in- 
coming streams — through a subterranean 
outlet, and many were the stories told — 
among them the fabulous ones of the Baron 
La Hontan time — of the frightful whirlpool 
the escaping waters made. The outlet of 
Bonneville was at Red Rock Pass. But it is 
evaporation, and the lessened streams, irriga- 
tion, and the months of drought, that sink the 
surface of the Inland Sea. Usually, its rise 
and fall is twenty inches or less, but some- 
times the change is of several feet. 

101 



THE INLAND SEA 

Many days must the clouds discharge, the 
torrents roar, ere the time of the rising come. 
The Wasatch, the Oquirrh, the Onaqui, and 
the still more distant and unseen Uintas, must 
send down their tributes of augmented 
streams. Attracted toward one after another 
of the great ranges — as towards a magnet 
— the clouds must drift, the rain must feed 
the lakes, the lakes must supply the torrents, 
and these again the waters of the rivers. 
Through canon and valley, the streams must 
come until they find in this sea a bitter 
grave. Not one of these rivers whose moun- 
tain cradles I have not seen. Under ridges of 
iron-gray stone; by banks and slopes of 
crumbling shale; through narrow gates, giv- 
ing scarce room for the infant stream and 
the mountain trail; by isolated peaks, girt 
with rocky belts, or misty with groves of 
pine; beneath strangely twisted mountains, 
broken with craggy glens, and by rough saw- 
mills, noisy with hum of whirling saw, and 
exhaling the smell of new-cut logs — through 
such scenes I picture the waters come. I see 

102 



THE INLAND SEA 

them in sad, bleak, hollows — storm-broken 
fragments huddled along their sides and 
dizzily poised as ready for instant fall; I see 
them plunge down the mighty slopes, 

Where the bald-eagle, dweller mid the scene, 
With ruffled breast and wings aslant, serene, 
Rises to meet the storm, 

and where, in dizzy swiftness, they tear across 
smooth slabs of granite, or are themselves in 
turn overhung by time-worn boulders of 
colossal size. I see them where they wind 
peaceful and quiet by the side of field and 
meadow, or once again, where the silence 
is broken only by voice of the village urchin, 
calling to his companion, as he fishes in the 
darksome pools, or where the stillness is 
broken only by the tinkle of cow-bells, or 
sounds of rural labor — the Weber, the Bear, 
Timpanogas, (Provo) and all the rest of them. 

The Month of Vintage— the Month of 
Wine? how flows the juice of the grape, now 
is gathered the fruit of the vine. After 

103 



THE INLAND SEA 

sheaves of wheat comes the Harvest Home, 
and after toil comes the purple clusters and 
the Vintage Song. Sursum corda — keep up 
your courage, say I. A homesteader's vines, 
like a homesteader's heart, should be filled 
with hope. From my father, I have inherited 
these — a love for an island, and a love for the 
vine. Two good reasons, it appears to me, why 
in my present venture I may hope to succeed. 
Who knows! Let me endure; let me hold 
on to my thought to a consummation! Per- 
haps the grapes in purple clusters, shall yet 
hang thickly on these trelliced squares, per- 
haps the leaves will fret with their green- 
ness these slopes and walls. "From the sand 
lands," says Ruskin, "come a high intellect and 
a religious art, from the vine lands come the 
highest intellect and a perfect art." What a 
promise is there! Sands on the beach, and 
vines on the slope; these days with their 
sheen give brave thoughts of the future. 
May these rocks themselves yet be christened 
with their own yielding of wine! If the will 
can accomplish — then it shall be so. 

104 



THE INLAND SEA 

A goodly harvest the sifters have gathered. 
The coarse brown sacks are piled on the shore. 
The workmen await the schooner's coming; 
but in my vineyard no gathering is seen. The 
work of redemption is a work that proves 
slow. It is easier to gather than it is to 
create. The trenches and pits, the embank- 
ments, that the labor of my neighbors has 
made, causes that part of the island to appear 
like a fortified camp. The workmen through 
these latter weeks have encroached their 
lines upon the gull metropolis. A destiny is 
manifest. Struggle as valiantly as they may, 
the poor birds must yield to their fate. Be- 
fore the energy of the human being, they 
must, as all things else, give way, and in the 
future the place that has known them so long 
shall know them no more. 

My vineyard follows the island's natural lines. 
Above the present beach, a series of irregular 
terraces, one above the other on the nearest 
slope, the rude posts and trellices on the old 
beach flats, show well enough that my man 
has not been idle. My chief and longest 

14 

105 



THE INLAND SEA 

trellice follows a curve on the hillside made 
by a pause in the shrinkage of ancient Bonne- 
ville. Somewhat lost the transplanted vines 
must feel, none of their kindred for so many 
miles around, and exiled, too, without the 
power of return. For them it is victory or 
else it is death. 

" Nothing^ s so hard but search will find it out." 

Water must be made to bubble from amid 
these stones. Labor must overcome the 
resistance of nature, for without water my 
labor is likely to be my pay for my pains. I 
may long to be Prospero, but alas! I have 
been compelled to be my own Caliban, too. 0, 
for the smallest, the most unnoticed stream 
that goes to waste on the distant Wasatch! 
With the means of irrigation, my task now 
so difficult would be made quite easy. The 
struggling plants have shown green and fresh 
enough, and quite healthy, too, but to reach 
success, I must probe in the earth. 

Currents of fresh water continue to flow, 
some say, beneath the hard-pan which under- 

106 



THE INLAND SEA 

lies this brine. Can I reach to one of those? 
Cultivated plots of ground may at this time 
be seen on one of the eastern islands, but 
this is an island — Church — which is nearer 
the mainland, and is much larger and higher 
than this one, and so possesses a natural spring. 
In my eastern view, Fremont, about twenty 
miles distant, is faintly discernible. The 
autumn sun now rises just behind its castle- 
shaped rock. On this island Judge Wenner 
set plants, and on Antelope Island an orchard 
grows. The trees of this orchard are thirty 
years old. On Fremont there is an English 
elm, not a tree, however, but a tiny young 
shoot struggling with British persistence. 
Will it manage to live? However, there winds 
the path that was made by my feet. To keep 
alive these few past months the vines that my 
hand has planted, how many gallons of water 
have been carried from the rain-filled tanks! 
Have I persisted so long to give up now? 
Those leaves that have sprouted so greenly; 
that grew so bravely, that have lived their 
allotted days, and now hang pale and crisp on 

107 



TEE INLAND SEA 

the parent vine, or lie brown upon the beach- 
line of old vanished waves — shall they be the 
last of a race? I cling to the faith that they 
foretell a host. What have I been taught, if 
not taught this — to patiently watch and to 
wait! 

Once more a troglodyte. Drip, drip! In- 
cessantly the water runs off from the roof. 
Now one could half know the gloom of mind 
in which the ancient cave-dweller passed the 
long winter months, and with what reluctance 
he relinquished the companionship and wild 
sports of his fellows, and retreated, like the 
lower animals, to his rocky den. How shall 
we cheat the time? Like a wetted pebble is 
the rocky island. The bushes drip, the porous 
ground is dark and softened, the sands of the 
beach are white and shining. I feel myself 
relapsing into old desires; but the sifters, wise 
men, pass a n'oyous time. The day of their 
departure is close at hand. Their work for 
the year is done, at any moment the schooner 
may appear in sight, and then an end to all 

108 



IKE INLAND SEA 

diversion. Their uproarious mirth makes the 
rafters of their dwelling ring. 

Despite my many crotchets and they are not 
few, I depend upon the sifters to enliven the 
tedium of these final hours. Man is naturally a 
gregarious animal. Such intractable weather 
as this, if nothing else, would drive him to 
social intercourse. I join in the sifters' 
games. When my sifter, the drudge, and I 
part company, there will be regret on one 
side, at least. The man has often been my 
willing companion, nor do I need a better 
guest. Talkative or taciturn, one or the 
other, so I find those who have lived much 
alone. The drudge is the happy medium. I 
have barkened his words and I know his 
troubles. No man or life without its ambi- 
tions, and the drudge has his. Added to his 
giant-like strength are unexpected qualities of 
heart and head. Some of these I have learned 
to admire. Who is not pleased to see a reserve 
of strength? Sorrow and disappointment 
have found out the drudge, and in his slow 
mind he has been compelled to work out the 
109 



THE INLAND SEA 

problems of life. It is not without a bit of 
quiet vanity that the man sees himself so 
often a pictorial occupant of my island 
sketches, nor need I better critic than the 
drudge has sometimes been. Extremes meet: 
it is the truly cultivated and the rough, 
unlettered, who give a valuable judgment. 
The lesson oft comes when we least expect it, 
and not without a gratification, not unmixed 
with irony, it may be, did the maker of the 
sketches themselves see in his animate sub- 
ject the same thoughts at work that passed 
through his own brain as he pursued his 
different task. 

Grand are the statements of science; take 
the weather forecast: "A storm is brewing 
in the regions far to the south." How simple 
those words, and yet how much they tell! Or 
again, "A soliterraneous storm date is the — ;" 
or, "owing to the connectional action from 
the hot air being cooled and rolled back to 
the earth." Soon I may see, as well as those, 
another "Arctic wave, accompanied by very 

no 



THE INLAND SEA 

high winds." A season of changes and a 
station of vantage this? There is not a 
mood in these transitional times that escapes 
my sight. The position of my island in the 
midst of this far-reaching sea, and its sur- 
rounding landscape, gives me, in sort, the 
power of a seer. To one at a distance much 
that is otherwise unknowable is made to be 
plain. Shut in amid the walls of yonder high 
mountains, how different it would be to under- 
stand the movements of these recurring 
storms! From this island it is easy, and hence 
my endowment. From my hut window one 
can mark the coming of the clouds and note 
their progress along the parallel ranges. It 
is in the remoteness of the south-west — where 
there is a suspicion of the fore-shortened 
Tintic Range, and even of others beyond 
it, that the generic storms are seen to 
come. The Alpha and Omega of many a local 
storm I see. The Wasatch — 

Peace where the adverse winds meet and where lie 
In wait the thunder clouds — 

111 



THE INLAND SEA 

being of all the ranges within my sight, the 
loftiest, has bred, of course, or attracted 
towards itself, the greater number of 
local or isolated, wandering storms. Some- 
times, however, there is a separate gathering 
in the Oquirrh and Onaqui, or on the domes 
of Malad. Sometimes I see the tops of storm- 
clouds whose bases rest on the Uinta Range. 
Certain low mountains there are that serve as 
highways for the wandering kind, but it is 
the Wasatch alone that forms legions of clouds 
to pass on to the Uintas who in turn, send 
them eastward to drench with their storms 
the far gradients and plains. 

A storm which is to be general, and one 
that is to be merely a local disturbance, is 
easily foreseen. There are storms that pass 
not, that live and die, as it were, on their 
place of birth. There is the advance, the 
parting, the re-uniting of similarly disposed 
forces, the struggle of opposing storms and 
the great seasonic changes. Sometimes I 
have seen the storms on the mountains as 
one might see, the armies on a battle field. 

112 



iC 



THE INLAND SEA 

There were the hosts of cloud, rushing upon 
the mountain bulwarks, as the hosts of men 
rush upon some huge redoubt. There was the 
attack, the defense, the recoil. I saw some 
peak taken by the cloud forces, lost, retaken, 
and lost again. I learned to know the objec- 
tive points, I saw the contention around the 
great cores — the central clusters of highest 
peaks — aud foresaw the meeting of the cloud 
tides upon some mighty ridge, as once met 
the tides of men upon the plateau of Mont 
St. Jean. From the island, whole armies of 
cloud might be seen, sweeping across the 
crests; -ushing along the mountain roads — 
the c -Sons— and whole battalions sinking 
into cr. is ravines. In the lower valleys, the 
grass, the weeds, the foliage, bent down in 
terror at the fury of their passing, and dark- 
ness ca le across the expectant land. 

Now comes the end of autumn. The storms 
are cleared, but the last cold rain has frozen 
as it fell. In sheets and ice-embossings it 
gleams on the island rocks. There is no 

16 

113 



THE INLAND SEA 

mistaking these days. As spring breathed 
in the wind from the south, so now winter 
breathes again in the wind from the north. 
October passes, and passes in spacious mien. 

"The suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief." 

Still there lingers at eve a crimson glow 
on the eastern heights, and deeply yellow — 
aureolin-tinted, dashed with cadmium — are 
the western skies. Along the horizons, the 
mountain chains — their slopes still showing 
some former color, and on their summits the 
white of the newly-fallen snow — show lumin- 
ous through the ambient air. To-night the 
moonlight is rare. If ever in manhood's 
strength, one could bring back his childhood 
belief in magic islands and enchanted valleys, 
it would be in such a place, and on such a 
night as this. All is crystalline pure. The 
island peak, and even the near rocks appear 
cerulean. The slopes, the ridges, the tur- 
quoise-green water, and the far-off mountains 
themselves, are wrapped in a tender and 
silvery blue. 

114 



THE INLAND SEA 

There is silence around. Long since, the 
old and the gray-winged gulls have flown. But 
once more there falls from out the sky, and 
softened by distance, the dissonant clang of 
migrating geese; and once again I hear, a 
sound to stir the blood as one listens, the 
trumpet-call of the southward-flying swan. 



115 



(Bunnison flelanb— ifarcwell 



V. 

(5unni0on U0lant)— jTarcwell 

My friends are here; my household goods 
are piled aboard the yacht. The boat of the 
sifters' having departed ere mine arrived, the 
Gunnison, for a time at least, will be given 
over to solitude again. 

These 36,806,400 seconds; 613,440 minutes; 
10,224 hours; 426 days; 607? weeks, these 
14 months; or, to bring the calculation to a 
finer division, and one of nature's own, 
42,940,800, one sixtieth part of those heart 
beats that go to make up man's allotment of 
three score years and ten — these since my 
roof-tree was placed. Now my homesteading 
is done and I am free to depart. So many 
heart beats while I lay in sleep, lost in death's 
counterfeit; so many passed in action, forget- 

119 



THE INLAND SEA 

ful of the ego; so many in reverie, so many 
given to this and to that, and the time has 
slipped away. Can it be that fourteen months 
have passed already since the yacht that waits 
to bear me from hence, entered with its cargo 
this unusual port? Not so long ago, it seems 
to-day as yesterday. Not so long ago since 
we traversed, with our loads of building 
material, the parched and lonely desert shore. 
Not so long since we saw the rabbits and 
creatures of the waste — through wildness 
tame — and listened to the coyotes' serenade. 
Nor so long, either, since we embarked with 
boat sails set wing to wing from the last and 
well-remembered camping spot, and passed 
one by one the terminal peaks of the Desert 
Range, and opened out slowly as we came 
from the south, the bays and straits and so, 
by the jutting rocks and huge, black head of 
Strong's Knob, came at last to these island 
shores, and I began my now completed vigil. 

"His palace or his prison," so Kingsley 
declared England to him must be. How much 

120 



THE INLAND SEA 

indeed one may become attached to even the 
most barren spots is a truth well known, and 
day by day I have learned to love my island 
more. One of the strange things in life is 
this — there is no experience one would care 
to have missed— when once that experience is 
past and over. So it has been with this — 
I should dislike to part with it now. Whatever 
I might have done, if I had not done this — 
who would be able to tell? It might be the 
stamp of a limited power; a mind of inferior 
scope, that one could remain satisfied with a 
toy like this. But no, it is not an arc to 
determine my circle. One thing is certain, 
my island life has been the antithesis of 
travel. From the day of my marooning to 
this, my adventures, if such they may be 
called, have all transpired within the confines 
of this one scene. The transitions of effects 
which I have witnessed though, novel in 
themselves, have all been over these familiar 
outlines of foreground and distance. Among 
my books is a pair of old volumes — "First and 
Second Walks Through Wales," by the Rev. 

IS 

121 



THE INLAND SEA 

Richard Warner of Bath, 1799 — and also a 
book but recently issued from the eastern 
press. As lately I looked over "A Holiday 
Tour in Europe," noting the headings of 
chapters that the book contains, and also 
those of the earlier volumes, I was reminded 
of a patent fact. As much by the short 
walks of him, the one who carried his walking 
stick and knapsack, exploring at his leisure 
the beauties of his native land, and whose 
letters — the spelling, at times, a little obsolete 
— are dedicated to his patron squire; as by 
the up-to-date American abroad, whose trench- 
ant journalistic sentences often end with a 
self-assertive map, as with democratic free- 
dom, he compares, criticises and pronounces 
judgment on all that he sees, and who enjoyed 
all the modern facilities and luxuries for quick 
locomotion, I was reminded of one of the chief 
pleasures of travel, viz. — surprise. Whether 
or no one can derive the same degree of 
profit and pleasure from a daily observation 
of the scenes immediately around a given 
spot, under the changing phases of the day 

122 



THE INLAND SEA 

and year, and with none or a few companions, 
as he can from a rapid survey, in constantly 
changing company, of widely dissimilar scenes, 
peoples, and countries, it is difficult to say. 
Of course, much depends on the mood. The 
possibilities lie in the condition of mind. 
There is a consideration that is the result of 
an enforced notice and that which is given 
through the desire and gratification of change. 
One must be far more analytic in his seeing, 
to enjoy the former method of looking at 
nature and mankind, in preference to that of 
the latter — that much I have learned. The 
element of excitement is wanting, and in a 
measure, novelty, too. Thus it has been 
these months. Whether during this time I 
have been degenerating into a beast, or rising 
toward a god, what need to tell. In contem- 
plation, I have learned, perhaps, the root of 
action; have learned more of the world, it 
may be, than though I had journeyed upon it. 
At least, I have escaped taking unto myself 
the charge — "a fool's eyes are in the ends of 
the earth." 

123 



THE INLAND SEA 

During my watching, what mighty happen- 
ings have been. History has been made, 
civilization has advanced. Events fraught 
with importance to the coming ages have 
transpired; consummation has been given to 
the labor of centuries. Men have laid down 
their lives. Art, science, liberty, religion, 
each has known new martyrs; and all the while, 
I have been here in my littleness, taking con- 
cern in the changes wrought within the 
bounds of this small place, intent upon the 
doings of a mere handful of men, or watching 
the unfolding of a few green leaves. Yet in 
the pleasure derived from such, my island, 
I can truly say, has been made as much a 
palace as a prison to me. 

Here I make an inventory of property and 
benefits accrued since the day of my house- 
warming. A short list it may be, and some 
of the items not at all of present value, if of 
value at all, as the world goes, but on the 
whole, to the one who writes it, quite satis- 
factory: 

12i 



THE INLAND SEA 

A desert island, that is, an island that is 
perhaps a desert now, but if water shall come 
from below these rocks, one where I may yet 
eat the grape from the vine, if not the fig 
from the tree.* 

A step toward an understanding of the 
noble Arc of Horticulture: "Do men gather 
grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?" 

The actual difference between a practical 
and a theoretical mode of life. 

How to judge the whole from the arc of 
the circle. 

A proof undeniable, of the fact that it is 
always the unexpected that happens. An 



*I have called the island mine, although strictly 
speaking, I should say only a portion thereof. Of 
a total area of 155.06 acres, my homestead covers 
78.35 acres, the remaining part being divided 
between a railway grant, and a state school sec- 
tion. The northern part of the island — mine, is 
the one that is grand with cliff and bay. The 
state school section — 7.50 acres, comprises a low 
promontory; great blocks of stone and wave- 
washed boulders. 

125 



THE INLAND SEA 

opening of the eyes to the truth that sur- 
render is sometimes a victory. A seeing, too, 
that while we stand fumbling at the door 
which is locked, another may stand wide open. 

A knowledge of the Polar Star: that of a 
truth it remains stationary there in the north- 
ern heavens, a point of rest amid the suns, 
and the vast unseen. 

My home, a place of refuge by a rock of 
strength. 

A true application of the Mosaic law and 
its relationship to the admonition, "Do unto 
others as you would have them do unto you." 

An understanding of the verse of Eccle- 
siastes: 

"Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing 
better than that a man should rejoice in his 
own works; for that is his position: For who 
shall bring him to see what shall be after 
him?" 

The wisdom, too, that lies in contemplation, 
and the forsaking of works. 

A set of sketches, the true art qualities of 
which, after all, are far in excess of their 

126 



THE INLAND SEA 

strangeness. An excellent collect, and one, 
it appears to me, not without its value. Such 
as hold a proof that everywhere nature, as 
mankind, is akin. 

A bronzed countenance, and a gain in 
physical strength and well being. 

The virtue of possessing my soul in patience, 
and the memory of four hundred twenty-six 
days, the effect of which upon me mentally, I 
cannot just at present weigh, but which I 
believe will be beneficial. 

Not a poor investment of time, then, nor 
one likely, in mine own opinion, to cause me 
regret. 

To-night we illumined the island with a 
drift-wood fire. An enormous pile we made; 
the pine-tree and the fir that have been torn 
from their native rock, and by the course of 
many waters been brought to these alien 
shores. As the swift flames shot upward 
from the mass, the scene around us was 
romantic as well could be. And music, too? — 

127 



THE INLAND SEA 

is not the charm of out- door music every- 
where the same? On spreading plain, in 
forest, in heart of granite hills, or as with 
us, by the shores of a briny sea, "Music at 
nightfall" touches all hearts alike. No 
sooner are the shadows fallen than the 
emotions hold sway, and whatever be our 
feelings then, music is the key to all. The 
ferryman of the highland loch keeps time 
with his oar beats to a ballad of Burns or 
Motherwell; and the boatman on Killarney 
sings long and loud to the echo of Paddy 
Blake's Cliff. 

"The fisher on his watery way, 
Wandering at the close of day," 

whether it be on the gently rocking waves 
of the Mediterranean, or by the bleak shores 
of Norway, beguiles his time with song. 
Probably the most ancient Briton, paddling 
in his conacle of wicker was fully as suscep- 
tible to the influence of out-door music as 
were ever the Venetians in their gondolas, 
or as the dusky steersman of to-day, standing 

128 



THE INLAND SEA 

at the tiller of the dahabeeah, gliding up or 
down old Nile. Savage and civilized nations 
are alike in this. No difference whatever 
between those men of the long ago and the 
far-away, and us, as, filled with animal life 
and roused emotions, we sent a melody across 
the waste and brine. A grotesque spectacle 
we must have been, as with joyous zest we 
sang beneath the open sky. With baritone, 
and base, and tenor too, we joined uncultured 
voices in round and catch and glee; songs 
national, gay, or pathetic, as the thought of 
the moment willed, and all the while we heard 
an obligato of wind and sea. My own and the 
sifters' huts; the naked peak and the curving 
sands; the breaking waves, the waiting yacht, 
the trellised slopes, the wing of passing sea- 
bird; each rock and bush, each ridge and 
well-known crag, were reddened in the night- 
fire's glow. 

Historians invariably begin their account of 
a civilized country with a description of its 
earlier condition. Those who describe wild 

17 

129 



THE INLAND SEA 

places, seem to make every possible reference 
to man. A thousand miles of distance is 
sometimes the same as a thousand years of 
time; and such a difference may make one an 
actor in the beginning or in the ending of 
the course of empire. Civilization may yet 
flood with luxury this inchoate waste. "One 
wearies soon of seeing and admiring the 
purely external aspects of things, without 
knowledge of their structure, of their history, 
of their functions, or of their symbolism." 
What would be the use of either sketch-book 
or diary, if one could not see beyond the 
pictures, or read between the lines? The 
saying: "Vain men talk of the past, wise 
men of the present, fools of the future," is 
one that might be changed. The past only 
is sure, and the future certainly receives the 
consideration of the wise. What is life 
itself otherwise than a preparation, a strug- 
gle, and a retrospect? Extremes follow. Will 
some day the marble buildings of my island 
reflect in the Inland Sea? Will here be yet 
unthought of luxuries of the bath? Or will 

130 



THE INLAND SEA 

mankind progress beyond all that, and all 
needful tonics, restoratives of health, etc., be 
available by merely pressing upon a golden 
button ? 

Among the drift there lay a piece of wreck. 
Boats seldom come here, and this piece of 
timber bleached into perfect whiteness by 
exposure to heat and brine, must have floated 
for many a year. Cached among the stones 
that form the base of the crow's nest on the 
summit of the northern cliff, there is a metal 
cylinder. It contains the names of visiting 
boats and their crews who have touched at 
this point from time to time. The number is 
small; there are but five boats mentioned, and 
one of those is our own. Wrecks there have 
been elsewhere, for never did a body of water 
show more spite than does this sea. To the 
end of each boat's life must be placed the one 
word — wrecked. Of all the craft that have 
sailed on its waters, there is not one which, 
in seeming treachery or spiteful rage, it has 
not destroyed. On the shore of Stansbury 

131 



THE INLAND SEA 

Island there lies a boat which, from its general 
state of decay, the great holes broken into its 
sides, and its position just on the edge of the 
highest surf- line, I concluded to have been 
drifted across the sea, and been cast upon the 
rocks by a winter's storm. There have been 
wrecks on Church Island, too; on Promontory 
and the southern shore, but none, I think, so 
far westward as this. Perhaps the relic that 
fed our flames was a bit of the old Pioneer, 
or it may have come from the Star of the 
Wed. Mayhap it was a piece from the ribs 
of the Kate Connor, whose skeleton lay for 
several years at one of the river mouths; or, 
it may have come from the Stansbury scow, 
the Salicornia; or from the Pluribustah, or 
other boat with equally wreeuphonious name. 
At least, its age seemed to bespeak it as being 
from some initial craft to sail on the Inland 
Sea. 

Who among men was the first to set foot 
on this shore? The young army officer, per- 
haps, whose name the island bears. Or, it 

132 



THE INLAND SEA 

may be, some other of the Stansbury party, 
who touched here on the first survey. Who- 
ever it was, his name will be forever un- 
known, but what of the other islands? 

It chanced one day that I was looking at 
random over a lot of portraits in a photogra- 
pher's gallery, when one of the faces attracted 
and enchained my attention at once. It was 
an unusual face, I thought, one quite out of 
the general order. There was a lofty expanse 
of forehead, and the long, slightly waved hair 
was pushed carelessly back from the brow 
and temples. Two deep lines of thought were 
between the eyes; the wings of the nose were 
high, bespeaking originality, while from the 
ears to the top of the forehead, the distance 
looked almost as great as it does in portraits 
of the historian Prescott. About the upper 
face, there was something decidedly of the 
poetic temperament, though the lower part 
was strangely at variance with this. The 
chin was heavy and square-cut, the mouth 
large and firm, and, though it indicated that 
the possessor might be capable of much feeling, 

133 



THE INLAND SEA 

it showed more power than emotion. The 
muscles of the lower face, too, appeared dry 
hard and ropy, as from long exposure to the 
sun and weather, and the eyes, though there 
was a slight show of sadness in them, were 
dark, and piercing, and their far-away look com- 
bined that of the eagle with those of the poet. 
The owner of that face made his name 
famous. It was the redoubtable trapper, 
guide and explorer. Kit Carson. When, in 
company with "The Pathfinder," in 1843, he 
rowed over to the Disappointment Island, as 
they first named the Fremont, he thought 
that their boat was the very first to touch on 
that island shore. But of the truth of that 
supposition there is reason to doubt. Who 
cut the cross on the face of the rock? This, 
too, is unknown. The same man, it might be, 
one of the zealous old missionaries who lost 
that crucifix and rosary which were recently 
exhumed from a depth of four feet below the 
surface of the ground, by some laborers 
engaged in cutting a water-ditch in one of the 
villages on the eastern shore. We know, 

13i 



THE INLAND SEA 

therefrom, and there are records, too, that 
the Catholic missionaries traversed the neigh- 
boring valleys, and that they might have visit- 
ed some of the nearer islands, why should 
we doubt? The cross on Fremont was cut on 
the smooth face of a rock, now fast crumbling 
away, and is toward the north. Some have 
imagined that the emblem was cut by Carson, 
but Fremont does not mention it in his report, 
although he wrote of some trifling matters, 
the loss of the telescope-cover, for instance, 
an object that has been much sought after. 
This, however. Judge Wenner, who lived so 
many years with his wife and children upon 
Fremont Island, believed to have been found 
and hidden by the ravens who frequent the 
place. Their thieving propensities are well- 
known, and such a bright, shining object as 
the metal telescope-cover would have caught 
at once their watchful eyes. However all this 
may be, whoever may have preceded me here, 
and whatsoever may have been the object of 
their coming, myself, I believe, was the first 
person who came here for love. 

185 



THE INLAND SEA 

At 4 a.m. we quitted the bay. Land and 
sea were but vaguely defined in a struggle 
between the moonlight and dawn. Our main- 
sail was double reefed, for we entertained 
misgivings of the weather outside. The wind 
had been dead to the north, and blowing hard 
all night. On our side the hill, the water was 
quiet, but wake as often as we would, we heard 
the crashing of waves as they broke in the 
opposite bay. Half a mile from the island 
and we began to catch the wind; not so bois- 
terous at first, but enough to make my home 
fall rapidly astern. In a very short time, the 
Gunnison appeared to be farther away than 
Strong's Knob, six miles to the south, its 
outlines exceedingly grand. 

Soon, however, there was little time for 
admiring the scene. Winds and waves in- 
increased until the latter would have tossed 
a good-sized ship. The point we desired to 
make lay about twenty miles distant, some- 
what south of east, so that our course was 
nearly along the trough of the sea, but in 



136 



IBE INLAND SEA 

order to quarter the waves, we directed our 
course more northerly. 

With the waves already so high, and the 
wind increasing, anxious faces might have 
been seen on the yacht. Not but that we 
expected to weather it through all right, but 
when it taxed the power of two strong men 
to manage the tiller of such a tiny craft, 
affairs were getting serious. Perhaps, as 
"a landsman," I overestimated the danger, 
but still I believe that every man on board 
devoutly wished himself ashore; not in any 
craven way — perish the thought! — not to have 
evaded the danger then and there, and thus 
have missed its lesson, but wishing, rather, 
that we had fought it successfully through. 
All men, save born cowards, must know of the 
thrill, the secret sense of exultation, engen- 
dered sometimes in the presence of danger. 
To those who pass their lives in continued 
security, must sometimes come a longing, the 
knowledge of a sense not gratified. In the 
present case it might be argued, there was 
no way of escape; true, but under similar 

137 



THE INLAND SEA 

circumstances" no one need expect to make a 
cruise across the Inland Sea, without incurring 
the same kind of risks. 

By sunrise, the blow had come to its hardest. 
The waves had a vicious look, the foam tore 
fiercely from off their crests. We experienced 
one trying moment as we dropped the main- 
sail, a huge, green wave striking the boat a 
blow which surrounded us for the instant in 
hissing foam. The next moment, we were 
high on a crest, the foresail holding us 
steadily enough to the wind. 

That was the turning point; we began to 
breathe. The waves grew no higher, we 
fancied that they were growing less. What 
a magnificent sight it was, as the sun, lifting 
above a low bank of clouds, streamed on the 
turbulent sea! Struck by the level rays, how 
old the western mountains appeared; centuries 
of age seemed suddenly heaped on their heads. 
Toward the sun, how beautiful it was! The 
high, transparent waves pierced through by 
the light, so that they came forward like a 



138 



THE INLAND SEA 

craggy wall, emerald below, and topaz above. 
It realized the lines of Byron — 

"The yellow beam he throws 

Gilds the green wave that trembles as it glows." 

Only these words were never written to 
describe such a wild, tumultuous, ons weeping 
of waters such as we looked upon. 

In another hour, we had reached comparative 
quiet. Under the shelter of the tall Promon- 
tory Hills, the sea only acknowledged the 
past blow by running in short, jerky swells, 
the most trying to landsmen of all motions of 
water, and was fast approaching a state of 
calm. 

The remainder of that day, we passed in 
working slowly towards the east. Time and 
again we lay becalmed. With whiffs of wind, 
the prow of our boat crept nearer and nearer. 
Beautiful to my eyes appeared the first glimpse 
of the village streets and walls, with the 
peeping gables and chimneys, and the languid 
coils of smoke above them. While coming 
through the channel, between Fremont Island 

139 



TRE INLAND SEA 

and Promontory Point, we made a stop at the 
latter. Looking westward, a bluff of light- 
colored sandstone, with lower projections of 
slate, jutted boldly over the water. Across 
the sea, the western islands and mountains 
showed beautifully clear; especially the 
Stansbury Island, whose two high domes 
stood darkly shadowed against the sharp, 
dim snow peaks of the Tuilla Range. Over 
their summits was a massy cumulus, lovely 
in form and color. Seen near by, the cloud 
was probably of a dazzling whiteness, with a 
suggestion of thunder in the lurid shadows, 
but at the distance we viewed, it showed on 
the sky in the most exquisite aerial tints. 

Northward of this, across the great main 
body of the sea which we had placed behind 
us, amid the paleness of distance and the 
closing year, I sought to distinguish a well- 
known outline. Alas! it had vanished from 
sight — Gunnison Island, farewell! 



140 



Supplement 



Supplement 

It may not be out of place to give here a 
few general thoughts upon the Inland Sea. 
Various letters of which I am in receipt 
contain questions that are answered herein. 
In most cases, the questions asked are indi- 
cative of a desire, on the part of their writers, 
to become acquainted with the scenes this 
book suggests, as well as those actually 
described. 

The Inland Sea bears the reputation of 
being a most dangerous as well as a novel 
sheet of water, and the reputation is merited, 
beyond a doubt. Like all mountain-locked 
seas, this one is subject to quick and unex- 
pected change, and the islands, most of them 
with iron-bound shores, cause very ugly cross- 
currents, which, in connection with sunken 
reefs, often cramp the mariner in a choice of 

U3 



THE INLAND SEA 

sea-room. For carelessness, there is no place. 
In a cruise of any length, heavy seas are likely 
to be met with, and it is almost incredible, to 
those whose sailing has been confined to lighter 
waters, the force with which the briny waves 
can strike. In spite of its density, however, 
the water has a peculiar aptitude for trans- 
mitting motion, so that in a short time the 
waves rise to a trying height, though, be it 
understood, they fall as quickly upon the 
cessation of a blow. 

Promontory Point is associated in my mind 
with another stress, other than that one already 
described. In the month of April, and near the 
spot that gave us before so kindly a shelter, 
I passed, but in another boat, as nasty a day 
as one would much care to see. On the 
previous evening, we had anchored in the 
neighboring channel, and on Easter-Sunday 
attempted the Gunnison run. By the coming 
storm, we were forced back again to the shore. 
This time we were caught on the west side of 
the range, and for thirteen long hours we 
faced the teeth of a north-west gale that, 



THE INLAND SEA 

like a living and infuriated creature, lashed 
and roared around us. 

In making a cruise to the islands occupying 
the north-west part of the sea, it is always 
necessary to carry a plentiful supply of water. 
Up to the present time, all attempts to obtain 
the precious fluid on those islands have failed; 
and any disaster there would be attended by 
the ugliest possibilities. The intense brine 
of the sea gives another danger. In rough 
weather, there is no question of endurance in 
swimming, a few mouths full of the choking 
water soon puts an end to all that. An aff"air 
happened to one of the Stansbury party, but 
in really a moderate sea; even then the poor 
fellow who suffered an involuntary immersion 
in the briny waves was unfit for duty for the 
next forty-eight hours. 

That the voyager will meet with any of 
these mishaps, however, is quite improbable. 
There is no reason why the Inland Sea should 
not be a source of much actual pleasure. Of 
the sights attendant upon the place, I have 
endeavored to give a clue in the preceding 

U5 



TEE INLAND SEA 

pages. A body of water upon which one may 
sail, day after day, without looking twice on 
the same shores, and which presents such 
striking features, certainly offers attractions 
in the way of boating. A cruise is kept 
unabated in interest until the end. 

As some interest may attach to the style of 
boat best adapted to sail on the Inland Sea, I 
give here the peculiar build of the boat in 
which most of my cruisings were made. Judge 
Wenner's boat — the Argo — once bore me to 
and from the Gunnison, but the Cambria, built 
and owned by Mr. D, L. Davis of the yacht club, 
a gentleman who has cruised more than any 
other one man upon the Inland Sea, up to the 
present time, has been demonstrated to be an 
excellent craft to buffet the heavy waves. In 
dimensions, it is twenty- one feet over all, ten 
feet beam. The hull (three feet depth of hold^ 
eighteen inches draught,) or, rather, hulls, — 
for, although the boat is classed as a yacht, 
it is strictly of a catamaran build,— are 
fashioned on lines to offer the least possible 

U6 



^ _ 






^^.'tmrr^i^WAA 



'<^:i 



THE INLAND SEA 

resistance to the dense water, while at the 
same time keeping the boat perfectly free from 
the danger of upsetting. In canvas, it carries 
a main (twenty-four feet boom), and a jib, a 
gaff and a jib topsail; and is managed, of 
course, with a double rudder. Mr. Davis, 
however, has recently completed and put 
upon the sea, another and larger boat, with 
better accommodations, though retaining all 
the essential qualities of the first and smaller 
boat. 

In one of the pictures (III) reference is 
made to effects of mirage. In the foregoing 
diagrams are shown three effects of mirage 
on the Inland Sea. They are but rarely seen, 
but may be sometimes witnessed on a hot 
afternoon in July or August. Figure 1 is a 
bit of western shore, detached by mirage and 
apparently floating in air, land and reflection 
being indistmguishable, and the horizon line 
eaten away. In figure 2, there is the same 
effect of land and reflection, but, instead of 
appearing to float in air, there is a semblance 

U8 



THE INLAND SEA 

to some strange barge moving along the 
horizon. This horizon ia, as will be imagined, 
a false one, and is caused by a breeze moving 
on the near water, while the true horizon is 
calm, and lost in the sky. 

In color, there is a witchery about the 
mirage, far beyond the reach of artist's 
palette. Thus, in figure 2, the sky was of a 
golden gray, absolutely dazzling with light, 
while the island and its reflection were a fiery 
yet decided blue. In figure 3, again of 
islands floating in the air, the color was 
altogether exquisite — gold-gray sky, gold- 
white clouds; with distant water the same 
tint as the sky, and which it appeared to be. 
Nearer, the water was of a pale, almost 
invisible green, crossed not by waves per- 
ceptible to the eye as such, but by dim blurs, 
caused by the faintest, gentlest touch of 
winds. 

There is another phenomenon to be seen at 
infrequent periods on the Inland Sea, one that 
is unpaintable, and also, I believe, entirely 
local. It is to be witnessed during the calm 

149 



THE INLAND SEA 

summer twilights, when the pale, fairy-like 
tints on the water are breathed upon by 
opposite currents of languid wind. As they 
interplay in bands, in points, in shifting isles 
of amber, azure and rose, the whole surface 
shimmers and glistens like a silken robe 
studded with countless pearls. 

In the pictures themselves, I have left out 
many entries from my diary pages in which 
are described brilliant effects of light and 
color. I feared to say too much, the orig- 
inals unseen, and it might be thought the 
words were drawn from the imagination. 
They were accurate, however, and I almost 
regret their omission. Yet enough has been 
said, perhaps, to leave a true impress upon 
the mind of the reader, of the strangeness 
and beauty of these desert shores that are 
washed by the waves of the Inland Sea. 



150 



DFX 15 1902 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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